
aass££A£07. 
Book -T/^ 



d* ^ I ^ 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET 




K 



Prototype of Hamlet 



Other Shakespearian Problems 



\ 



^' 



V 



WM. PRESTON JOHNSTON 



" Look into the seed of time 
And say which grains will grow and which will not." 

— Macbeth, 1, 3. 



NEW YORK : 

BELFORD COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

18-22 East i8th Street 



?c^0 






*^3V 



-io 



^5 



TBOW'8 

PRINTmo AND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANl, 

NEW YORK. 



TO MY WIFE, 

MARGARET AVERY JOHNSTON, 

WITH WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT AND APPROVAL 

THESE LECTURES WERE WRITTEN, 

THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED. 
April 2 ^th, i8go. 



CONTENTS 



LECTURE FIRST. 

HOW TO STUDY SHAKESPEARE, 

The growth of literary aspiration. Definition of true litera- 
ture : one form of the Church of God, holy, catholic and 
apostolic. Implicit mora! culture of the drama. Shake- 
speare's popularity and hold upon the thought of the world. 
Advantages of Shakespeare as a study ; interesting, stimulat- 
ing to the reason and esthetic sense ; the best aid in study of 
rhetoric, of philology, and of literature. Should be a study, 
not a pastime. Method of study must depend on point of 
view. Richard Grant White's dictum of reverent study. 
Dogmatism of commentators. Where Shakespeare's writings 
are to be found. Description of First Folio, by Richard 
Grant White. Rectification of errors. Different aspects of 
academic instruction in study of Shakespeare, of which the 
ethical is the highest 

Method of study. Beware of too ambitious a design. Part 
better than the whole. Study from the historical standpoint; 
value of the Chronicle Plays ; value of the Roman Plays. 
Julius Cassar, for educational purposes. First step ; to read 
it. How to pursue the study. The traveller's method of 
comprehend'ng a city — Rome. Reconnaissance first, then 
critical study. Shakespejire and Plutarch. The sideUghts 
and specific points of interest in Julius Cassar. Each play 
must be studied with reference to its central idea. Illustra- 
tions of this canon. The Tragic Quadrilateral ; Lear, 
Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet. Natural movement and pro- 



8 CONTENTS. 

cess of tragedy ; from cause to crisis ; thence, through its 
consequences, to the catastrophe. Illustration by triangle, 
or by Gervinus' arch. Shakespeare preserves our sense of 
moral proportion by adherence to this canon 17 

LECTURE SECOND. 

MACBETH. 

Self-knowledge ; its attainment under the light of intelligence 
and charity. The aid to be found in literature, the message 
of one man's genius to all men's hearts. The perennial sway 
of genius. Shakespeare, the supreme poet. His personality, 
his genius, his psychology. Macbeth, his greatest poem. 
Hallam's opinion ; Drake's, Campbell's, Gervinus'. Its 
incompleteness in detail. An outline, or a torso ? Swin- 
burne's view. Shakespeare's great heroic drama. Its 
grandeur. Its problem obvious, but grand and pathetic. 
Hamlet and Macbeth, psychological complements ; the 
vacillating will, the lawless will. Web of the plot ; the story 
told. Felicity in selection of time, place, plot and theme of 
this tragedy ; the time, a golden age ; Scotland, a mysterious 
land ; regicide, a timely and exciting theme ; the problem, a 
contest for a human soul. 

The Supernaturalism of Shakespeare. Popular beliefs as sym- 
bols of unseen forces. The first words of a play its keynote ; 
illustrations. The Weird Sisters. Shakespeare's intuition of 
the loathsomeness of evil. The Weird Sisters real beings, 
tempters, mousing owls of Satan, but with no power over the 
conscience or will. Character- of Macb e th at outse t : lofty, 
valiant, energetic, imaginative, blunt, reticent, lawlessly 
ambitious. He_entertains JheJeinptation, His wife's part. 
Duncan's innocence. The chiaro-osairo of murder. The 
action and reaction of murderous purpose. Character of 
Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare's absolute artistic perceptions 
in delineating characters illustrated. The feminine recoil in 
Lady Macbeth, and her remorse and death. Macbeth's 
indomitable energy and courage. The consequences of guilt ; 



CONTENTS, 9 

the delusive promises of Satan; moral isolation. The lesson 
of Macbeth : temptation, guilt, perdition. " Fear God and 
keep His commandments." 41 

LECTURE THIRD. 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HAMLET. 

The primacy in letters. Homer's place ; Shakespeare's. The 
Baconian paradox; its weakness. Comparison of Bacon's 
actual gifts with Shakespeare's. Goethe's inspiration from 
Shakespeare. Coleridge's estimate. A world literature 
impossible to any writer. Shakespeare's true relations to 
literature, and first place in it. Hamlet, his greatest crea- 
tion. Comparison with his other plays. Its defects and 
limitations but lays bare a human heart. Our debt to Goethe 
for touching key-note of its meaning. Extracts from Wil- 
helm Meister discussing the play. Lecturer's modifications 
of same. Werder's antagonistic interpretation. W. W. 
Story's criticism of the German critics. Coleridge's inter- 
pretation ; Lowell's. Manifold solutions of the play, espe- 
cially by the Germans ; Carl Karpf, Rcetschl, Freiligrath, 
Sievers, Rohrbach, Benedix, Rapp, Voltaire, Chateaubriand. 
Was Hamlet's madness real or feigned? Representation, 
the province of the poet. Shakespeare's purpose in Hamlet 
to portray a man, and the defeat of the human will. Hamlet 
and Macbeth are complements, illustrating individual re- 
sponsibility for our actions. How these questions are an- 
swered in each. Macbeth teaches the duty of rectitude of 
will; Hamlet, of decision of will. Influence of Shakespeare's 
germ of doubt on modern skepticism. Robert Elsmere. 
Amiel's Journal. A Hamlet in real life. No escape from 
the responsibility to act. The hesitation in the hero of Ham- 
let and the unexpectedness of the catastrophe necessary parts 
of the tragic purpose. The lesson enforced, not in a type or 
abstraction, but by portraying an individual man. Was it 
himself? Kreyssig, Kenney, Hazlitt. " It is we who are Ham- 
let." " A No Philosopher ; " the evolution of a human soul 



JO CONTENTS. 

in its totality presents a portrait. Hamlet's situation beyond 
his powers. His self-condemnation. Poetry is creation, not 
analysis. Each character a portrait, plus Shakespeare. 
Hamlet a likeness of the poet and of ourselves also — and of 
another. An image of the philosophic soul paralyzed by 
defect of will. The lesson of prompt and resolute action .... 12 



LECTURE FOURTH. 

THE AUTHORSHIP OF HAMLET. 

Their value my apology for extensive quotations in last lecture. 
"Who wrote the original Hamlet ? Three plays so named. 
The accepted version, or last Hamlet, based on Quarto 
Second, undoubtedly Shakespeare's. The First Quarto. 
Their titles. Their variance. Three theories to account for 
the intrinsic character of Q i; ist, A mangled copy of Q 2; 
2nd, Clarendon Editors', partly Shakespeare's based on an 
older play by another hand ; 3rd, an older form of play, but 
Shakespeare's own. When Q 2 waswritten. Footnote on 
the Inhibition. Title-pages of the two Quartos express their 
real difference. How Q i came to be printed. Q 2 an evo- 
lution from Q I . Q I probably an actor's copy used at the 
Universities, but essentially Shakespearian. The First Ham- 
let a hypothetical play, not extant; probably differing some- 
what from Q I. This original draft generally assumed not 
to be by Shakespeare. Burden of proof on those who deny 
his authorship. Halliwell takes alien authorship for granted. 
Review of evidence. Clarendon Editors believe it unworthy 
of Shakespeare in 1589, Who was adequate to the task? 
Fleay's conjecture of Marlowe's joint authorship. Most 
opponents of Shakespeare's authorship argue from his want 
of ability or preparation at that time. These arguments and 
the Clarendon theory mutually destructive. The youthful 
Shakespeare not equal to his later self, but superior to all 
others. Probable date of composition of First Hamlet in 
1587. C. A. Brown's opinion of its authorship. View of 
Knight and others. Value of opinion of Clarendon Editors. 



CONTENTS. I J 

Francis Meres' list of plays considered. His opinion of 
Shakespeare. Incorrect inference from his List. Temporary 
eclipse of Hamlet in 1596, and reasons for its final revision 
then. Malone's theory of Kyd's authorship. His incongru- 
ous and untenable grounds. Skottowe, Collier, Dyce, Fleay, 
Symonds, on this point. "The play within a play" as 
evidence. Other instances of same. No evidence at all of 
Kyd's authorship, and Marlowe's share a mere surmise. 
Shakespeare alone equal to it. Shakespeare's, the only trag- 
edies that survive. Two bands of literary wreckers at work 
on Shakespeare. Elze's argument from Euphuism, of an 
early production of Hamlet; also of its evolution from Ham- 
net's birth and death. Nash's allusion in 1589. Fleay's 
belief controverted that this refers to Shakespeare as an actor 
only. " The Noverint." Greene's " Shakescene " in 1592. 
Chettle's apology. Henslow's Diary says Hamlet was acted 
in 1594. Lodge's reference in 1596. Summing up of the 
evidence. The positive evidence all in favor of Shakespeare's 
authorship. Flimsy character of the negative evidence. 
Shakespeare's genius phenomenal, but not abnormal. His 
long continued and undisputed title to this play and his 
transcendent genius sufficient grounds for our belief. Incor- 
rect notions of genius. Its elements. Shakespeare's con- 
formity to its criteria. The author of First Hamlet 105 



LECTURE FIFTH. 

THE EVOLUTION OF HAMLET. 

Shakespeare, the founder of the romantic drama. The other 
dramatists, his successors and disciples. The exception, the 
University Group. Fleay' surmise of collaboration with 
Marlowe. Comment. Marlowe's ability. Baselessness of 
the conjectural criticism that assigns Shakespeare's plays to 
other writers. His competitors were contemporaries rather 
than predecessors. Lyly and Peele ; Marlowe. Argument 
based on Shakespeare's intellectual sterility, irrational; that 



12 CONTENTS. 

on his youth, equally so. Marlowe's case. Undisputed con- 
temporary opinion the only proof of authorship by any of the 
dramatists of that day. Their personal obscurity. Shake- 
speare's education. Ben Jonson's estimate of him. His 
small indebtedness to others. His theatrical career. Venus 
and Adonis. His ability to write the original Hamlet. Other 
instances of equally precocious genius. Objections to Shake- 
speare's ability ever to have written his plays. Smith's 
"Bacon and Shakespeare." Theory of his nonentity con- 
sidered. Was he a lawyer's clerk ? Lord Campbell's book; 
Cartwright's. Inferences from his legal phraseology in Ham- 
let. Public disregard of dramatic authors. Hartley Cole- 
ridge's favorable deductions from the absence of proof of evil 
against them. Shakespeare's worth as a man. Little known 
of personality of writers even now. Contemporary opinion 
of Shakespeare ; Ben Jonson, Meres, Weever, Sir John 
Davies' verses. Shakespeare's call to the stage and his rapid 
rise. His dramatic method and creative faculty. The 
co-operative mode of producing plays; their plots. Growth 
of Hamlet. Revision in 1596. Reasons for it. Its pessimism. 
W. W. Story's criticism. The personality in Hamlet. 
Hamlet's death. Shakespeare's dream and waking. Pos- 
sible disappointment in friendship. The dregs of sin. Entry 
in Stationer's Register in 1602. Erroneous inferences. The 
Last Hamlet saturated with Shakespeare's personality. 
Hamlet, an evolution. The particular portrait becomes the 
mirror of all mankind 134 



LECTURE SIXTH. 

THE PLOT OF HAMLET. 

Toleration and fanaticism in critical literature. The full and 
final significance of Hamlet not contained in first draft. The 
highest ideals often originate in the least ambitious designs. 
How Shakespeare came to create Hamlet ; the times, the 



CONTENTS. 13 

environment, the antecedents. The spirit of the age. Eliza- 
bethan England, an era of awakening, action and question- 
ing. The demand for truth. The intense nationality and 
patriotism of Englishmen and of Shakespeare. His reverent 
skepticism. His purpose in writing this play. Shakespeare 
a poet, but also a courtier, a play-writer and a patriot. Pol- 
itical uses of the drama 
The poUtical situation in 1586. Covert war. Elizabeth and 
Mary Stuart. Public demand for death of latter. All of 
Shakespeare's patrons among her enemies. Her execution 
determined on. Attitude and character of James VI of Scot- 
land. The Master of Gray's letter. King James to be 
appeased. All means tried. The play as a political device ; 
instances. Loyal rage against Mary. Her death. Ehza- 
beth's tortuous repudiation of it and peril to her Council. 
Justification needed. The rebuke of regicide and of vacilla- 
tion illustrated in Hamlet. ProbabiHty of Shakespeare's 
employment. Dramatic fecundity of the day. The plot of 
Hamlet fits the case of the murder of Darnley. A pattern 
for it twenty years old. Sir Wm. Drury's Letter. Proto- 
types of the persons of the drama. My adoption of this 
theory. Rev. Mr. Plumptre's pamphlet in 1796. Furness' 
summary of it. Resemblances of plot of Hamlet to the 
murder of Darnley. Likeness of Hamlet to King James in 
character. Silberschlag's support of same theory. Com- 
ments of Moberly and Hunter. Confirmation of arguments 
by discovery of Q i in 1823. Grounds for this theory are : 
1st, the motives of British Government for employing this 
device; 2nd, resemblance of plot and details to death of 
Darnley, and similarity of character of Hamlet and James. 
Where and what is Shakespeare's Denmark. Its identity 
with Scotland, illustrated by geography, customs and per- 
sonal traits of the characters. Lowell's comment on the 
condition of social transition in Hamlet. Scotland exactly 
answers it. James VI's personal legacy of revenge. His 
vacillating and equivocal nature and policy. Hamlet's self- 
reproach for hesitation in revenge. Suggestions of the play 
to the King 160 



14 CONTENTS. 

LECTURE SEVENTH. 

THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

Origin of plot. Saxo-Grammaticus. Belleforest's version. 
The English translation. Unlikeness to the play. Its date. 
Contrasts. Comparison of legend and the play. The brief 
widowhood of Mary Stuart and Gertrude. Their marriage 
with the murderers. The physical beauty of The Ghost and 
of Darnley, and the ugliness of Bothwell and Claudius. The 
tenure of the royal title. The title of Claudius as King 
Consort, legal. Note on "imperial jointress." Succession 
by bequest. Hamlet's claim. Dilemma of Hamlet. His 
irresolution. Revenge for regicide taught him as a duty. 
The penalty of a refusal of responsibility. The " Blood. 
Tragedy," " Hamlet, Revenge ! ", a stepping-stone to 
Shakespeare's promotion. The son of murdered Darnley 
naturally the prototype of the son of mui-dered Denmark. 
Identity in character. Sir Antony Weldon's sketch of James. 
Scott's, in "The Fortunes of Nigel." The Venetian Ambas- 
sador's sketch. Bishop Racket's. Comparison of James 
with these accounts. To Shakespeare and English loyalists — 
the Coming Man, the Prince ! Hamlet fits into this char- 
acter. Is the creation of an ideal organic man in fiction pos- 
sible without an actual archetype in real life ? Only mortals 
become immortal, like Hamlet. Portraiture is representa- 
tion of an organism as viewed in the mind of the artist. 
An ideal is an image with something of the artist put into it. 
Hamlet, at first altogether James, was evolved, by Shake- 
speare putting himself into it. A Kentucky theory of Ham- 
let as " a scoundrel." His brutaUty to Ophelia; his projects,, 
plots, indirections, quibblings, and cowardice. Contrasts in 
James and Hamlet accounted for 

Argument based on Hamlet's age. The same as James'. 
Thirty years old in 1596. Proofs.' Only twenty when play 
first written in 1586. Proofs. Supposed inconsistency be- 
tween first part of play and last due to the Revision. Furni- 
vall; Halliwell's unauthorized sacrifice of the text. Peren- 
nial youth of fictitious characters. Real people grow older. 



CONTENTS. 15 

Hamlet grew older. " Full forty years " ckanged to " Full 
thirty years," in the Revision. Goethe's portraiture of Polo- 
nius; of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Bothwell's Confes- 
sion. " The beauteous majesty of Denmark." Froude's 
Mary Stuart. Swinburne's apostrophe to her. Who was 
Fortinbras? Summing up of the evidence. The body of 
Hamlet is James; the Divinity that animates him, Shake- 
speare 192 



PREFACE. 



The lectures contained in this volume were pre- 
pared for the senior classes in Tulane College and in 
the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for young 
women. But, in deference to a wish expressed by 
many lovers of literature, they were included in the 
courses of free public lectures on literature and 
science, delivered each year in Tulane University to 
the people of New Orleans. Having proved accept- 
able to large and intelligent audiences, they are now 
submitted to other students who take an interest in 
the subject, with the hope that they may add some- 
thing in the way of suggestion to a reverent and 
intelligent study of the great dramatist. 

The author has adhered to the form of lectures 
in which the subject was originally presented, since 
it was the spontaneous cast of his thought, and 
probably contains "more matter with less art" than 
if he should attempt to conform it to a more regular. 
model. 

In his interpretation of Shakespeare, truth, not 
novelty, has been the writer's aim ; and this, he 



1 8 PREFACE. 

believes, is to be found in the broad lines laid down 
by the giants of philosophical criticism, rather than 
in the iridescence of paradox, as illustrated in lesser 
lights. 

The chief problem and main contention in these 
papers is, however, for a proposition that may strike 
the reader as probable, plausible, or possibly pre- 
posterous, according to his point of view. The 
theory is maintained that, in his original conception 
of Hamlet, Shakespeare found the prototype of the 
Prince in James VI. of Scotland, and that the plot 
was greatly influenced by political events arising 
out of the murder of Darnley and the execution of 
Mary, Queen of Scots. The hypothesis is not alto- 
gether novel, but the present writer arrived at it by 
independent study, and has maintained it by facts 
unknown to the first propounder. Whether con- 
vincing or not, it is thought that the theory is founded 
on sound induction, and will, at least, prove 
curiously suggestive. If the readers of this book 
receive from it a small proportion of the pleasure 
the writer has felt in consulting the sources from 
which it is derived, he will be amply repaid ; and 
his object will be wholly attained if these lectures 
shall be accepted among the judicious as in any 
wise a valuable contribution to that body of Shakes- 
pearean study which is doing so much to stimulate 
and elevate the thought of our race. 

Wm. Preston Johnston. 
TuLANE University, 
New Orleans, La, April, 1890. 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET 

AND 

OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



HOW TO STUDY SHAKESPEARE. 

" What is the end of study ? let me know," 

Love's Labor's Lost, i, i. 

It is a matter of general remark that, in the last 
few years, literature has become fashionable in New 
Orleans. This means more than at first sight appears. 
It means that our people, and especially our women, 
have set for themselves a higher ideal than the old- 
time dance and piano ; and I say this without the 
slightest disrespect for these or any other legitimate 
forms-of recreation. The feeling has come home to 
our best and strongest women, those who mould and 
sway the opinions of the mass, that they must not 
delay to enter into that higher realm of thought 
which lifts humanity, eveh so much as one step, 
nearer to the Divine Archetype. And they have 
judged aright when they decided that this was to be 
found in the best literature. For the best literature 
embodies the best thought of the highest thnkers. 



20 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

addressed to the hearts of all mankind. That true 
literature is the mother of culture, none will gainsay 
who have nursed at her breast. Literature, to be true, 
must be holy, catholic, apostolic. It is one form of 
the Church of God, one medium by which the Divine 
spirit, through human means, reveals the divine truth 
to human hearts. It is not true literature unless it is 
holy, holy in every sense, healthgiving and inspiring 
to the moral nature ; catholic, addressed to all hearts, 
to our common humanity ; apostolic, the divine mes- 
sage, the truth once delivered to the saints, the gos- 
pel or Word of God carried forth to the world by 
those who are heaven-chosen to that end. Let me 
say, once for all, that any specious form of falsehood 
or diablerie, any ministration to the baser nature of 
man, is neither true art nor true literature. It is 
sham and veneering that will blister and peel and go 
to pieces under any honest heat of discussion. That 
an aspiration for true literature exists to-day in New 
Orleans is, therefore, certainly a most encouraging 
feature of our society. The question is how tltis 
University may contribute somewhat towards grati- 
fying so generous an impulse. 

To this end we have had the honor this year, 
through the kindness of Professors Ficklen and For- 
tier, to open up to you a view of the early dramatic 
literature of England and France, the beginnings of 
the Drama ; for, strangely enough, under the much 
mixed morality of the Drama, its masquerading and 
its rough and robust wrestling with truth, we often 
perceive the ethical problem more clearly than when 
formulated as sententious morality. It is in no 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 2 1 

spirit of depreciation or disparagement of other forms 
of literature^ however, that we invite you to some 
studies in the drama, pointing out a pathway for 
your footsteps rather than attempting to garner for 
you its full sheaves. History and fiction are of the 
utmost importance for both training and inspiration, 
and may evoke the highest powers of mind and 
soul. Poetry warms the heart, kindles the intellect, 
and exalts the imagination. But in no other depart- 
ment of literature is the implicit moral culture which 
reveals character-growth more effective than in the 
Drama. 

When we speak of the Drama the mind naturally 
reverts to the plays of Shakespeare. Next to the 
Bible they have the strongest hold on the thought 
of the civilized world. Without inquiring here into 
the cause, such is undoubtedly the fact. They fur- 
nish an inexhaustible field for the ingenuity of the 
commentator, whether his criticism touches on the 
archaeology, the philology, or the philosophy, con- 
tained in the text. In them the psychologist realizes 
the evolution of human character in its artistic com- 
pleteness, under the pressure of moral circumstances 
and of temptation, while the great, uncritical public 
consumes edition after edition of his works, and 
notes, essays, and commentaries innumerable, with 
as real a sense of gratification. The rude boards of 
the provincial theatre and the great temples of dra- 
matic art alike resound to the utterances of the bard, 
century after century, while boasted rivals seem but 
an ephemeral and flitting fashion, to-day in vogue, 
to-morrow forgotten. The popularity of Shakespeare 



22 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

is apparently limitless and growing ; and if, some- 
times, it exhibits the absurdities and erratic motions 
that deform every cultus and every form of hero- 
worship, yet we cannot disbelieve that it rests upon 
a real foundation, and that a solid substratum, a 
true bed-rock of genius, underlies the masterpieces 
of the prince of dramatists. One great advantage 
to be derived from the selection of Shakespeare as a 
study by those who are entering upon the pursuits of 
literature is that his works are deeply interesting ; 
and it is hard to over-estimate the importance of a 
genuine interest in the subject of any study. It 
means present vigilant attention, vivid apprehension, 
clear and complete conceptions, fresh and enduring 
recollection. It means business. It means mastery, 
It means appropriation, use, ownership, of a subject. 

But these plays are not merely current coin ; they 
are thought-breeders. They arouse the dormant or 
sluggish imagination. They people the mind, not 
with lay figures, but with living beings, who cry 
out continually to the heart and soul, "Awake; 
beware." They present the problems of existence, 
not in formulas, but in concrete men and women, 
saying, doing, and thinking, as we say, do, and 
think, and subjected to the immutable law of moral 
cause and consequence. Hence Shakespeare's plays 
are a philosophy more profound than the Dialogues 
of Plato and the Socratic discussions, in that they 
are exactly conformed to nature. 

If the literary models of Greece and Rome are 
the sole standards of art, the dramas of Shakespeare 
are not art, because they vary from these standards. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



23 



But if a Gothic cathedral embodies art, though in 
forms infinitely more complex, as truly as the 
Parthenon, then Hamlet, as well as Antigone, is 
art. If the landscapes of Church, or the drawings 
of Dore, are legitimate expressions of our aesthetic 
nature as surely as bas-reliefs from Athens or 
Olympia, then the Merchant of Venice and the 
Tempest are as true to fundamental art canons as 
the Iliad, the Aecestis, or the Birds. Shakespeare's 
creative genius constituted a new cycle of art, the 
cycle of nature as distinguished from that of con- 
ventional form; and what can be more inspiring 
than to receive the key to a new realm of art ? 

Shakespeare, next to the Bible, is the best manual 
in which to study rhetoric ; and for the simple reason 
that rhetoric is the science and art of most effectively 
expressing thought in language, and in Shakespeare 
the language does not merely clothe the thought, 
but actually embodies it. His "beauties," as they 
are called, admirable thoughts couched in words of 
exquisite fitness, have entered into the proverbial 
philosophy of the British race ; it may be said, 
indeed, into the body of aphoristic wisdom of the 
whole world. The sayings of the persons of his 
drama have crystallized into gems of thought, and 
longer passages linger, like familiar strains, in aged 
and weary memories. 

These works afford opportunity for the least irk- 
some form of philological study. When language 
study is pursued by the historical method, backward 
or forward, we find in the sunburst of the Shake- 
spearean drama its most vivid and imaginative form. 



24 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

and a phase absolutely necessary to a complete 
comprehension of the genius of the English tongue. 

Many will be found to agree with me that for 
a serious study of English literature, whoever else 
may be named as second, Shakespeare must be 
placed first. He is to us what Homer was to the 
Greeks. I may say, though with diffidence, he is 
more. He is our teacher, master, educator, in that 
prime philosophy, a knowledge of the human heart. 
Should we not make his works, then, a study rather 
than a pastime } If it be wise to sit where the 
chance drops of his world-wisdom may fall upon 
and bedew our robes, were it not better to go forth 
like him who walks in an April shower, when spring 
scatters her jewels with prodigal hand, till all our 
garments are moist and saturate with the descending 
floods "i Is it not better to be the disciple of the 
largest and most liberal sage in all our literature 
than to speak in the words of any other master.? 

But let us suppose it admitted that Shakespeare is 
the most, or at least a most, desirable study for the 
lover of literature, how are we to get the best results 
from such study ? The method to be adopted must 
of course depend largely on the end in view, and 
will vary with the age, attainment, experience, and 
tastes of the student; and it must also depend largely, 
of course, upon the special culture of the teacher, and 
the standpoint from which he approaches his subject. 
But it may be laid down as a fundamental canon 
in the study of literature that it must be pursued in 
the literature itself, and not in what is said about it. 
That fierce Shakespearian, Richard Grant White, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 25 

says of his book, "Shakespeare's Scholar:" "It 
attempts not to decide what Shakespeare might have 
written or what he could have written, or to seek the 
interpretation of his thoughts from those who pro- 
claim themselves his prophets, but to learn from him 
what he did write, and to study to understand that in 
the submissive yet still inquiring spirit with which a 
neophyte listens to the teachings of a revered and no 
less beloved master." And then he goes on to casti- 
gate "the editors, commentators, and verbal critics," 
rejoicing that he has "kept free from the contamina- 
tion and perversion of their instruction." 

While Mr. White was undoubtedly correct in his 
main idea, and a very good understanding may be 
had of the current of Shakespeare's thought by 
reverent and unaided study of his text, few readers 
will be found to agree with him, when he says, " It 
is folly to say that the writings of such a man need 
notes and comments to enable readers of ordinary 
intelligence to apprehend their full meaning. " It all 
depends on what the notes are. The methods pur- 
sued by the commentators of the last century, the 
egotistic and elephantine dogmatism of Warburton 
and Johnson and the wild guesses of many others, 
are enough to provoke a more saint-like temper than 
Mr. White's. They are well parodied by that critic 
who said, "Shakespeare could not have written : 
' Sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, 
And good in everything : ' 

that was nonsense. He must have written : ' Ser- 
mons in books, stones in the running brooks ; ' those 
were y^c/s that could be proved." 



26 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

"A reverent study," as White says, will, however, 
accomplish much. Indeed, this is the main thing ; 
study, not skirmishing. Many, I trust, will be found 
in this audience willing to devote their time to this 
study, and it will be the object of this lecture, with- 
out attempting at all to exhaust the subject, to fur- 
nish a few hints that may prove useful to such as 
are in earnest in the matter. And I may say here 
that I feel all the real difficulties involved in my 
present attempt, which must presuppose in my 
audience an interest already established in the topic ; 
and I must rely for success more upon the instruc- 
tion conveyed than upon the amusement that is 
generally looked for in the lecture-hall. 

Having determined to study Shakespeare, the first 
step to be taken is to discover where his writings are 
to be found, as he wrote them. After almost three 
hundred years of shifting and change — of process — 
the text has nearly, though not quite, settled down to 
a standard, which may, or may not, be what the poet 
wrote. This standard, more fluctuating than a bi-me- 
tallic one, sways gently to and fro between Knight 
and White and Wright, and Hudson and Halliwell 
and Hazlitt, and many, many more, of whom each 
reader may take his choice. As a rule, I am content 
with the admirable Clarendon edition of Shake- 
speare's Plays, though Furness furnishes us with a 
variety of versions in his Variorum editions, so that 
a captious critic can pursue therein the round of 
Shakespearian study with a go-as-you-please gait. 
Scientific criticism has, in the crucible of common- 
sense, reduced much of the crude ore of eighteenth 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 27 

century commentary, and given us genuine metal in 
its stead as the result. But the youthful student may 
well ask : "Why was all this necessary? Why not 
give us just what Shakespeare wrote ? " That is 
exactly what the labor of a hundred commentators 
means. But again it will be inquired : "Why all 
their toil.? " And the reply is, "To arrive at what he 
actually did write." 

It is familiar, of course, to Shakespearian scholars 
that the Plays of Shakespeare were not printed until 
1623, seven years after his death, and then in the 
form known as the First Folio, which, though evi- 
dently full of flagrant errors, "is the only admitted 
authority for the text of his dramatic works." The 
First Folio contemned previous editions, as "stolen 
and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by 
the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors," and 
aimed to give a true copy of Shakespeare's plays ; 
but that enthusiastic student of Shakespeare, Richard 
Grant White, scarcely overestimates the defects of the 
First Folio itself in the following animated descrip- 
tion of it. "Such is the authority of this First 
Folio, that had it been printed with ordinary care, 
there would have been no appeal from its text ; and 
editorial labors in the publication of Shakespeare's 
works, except from such as might think it necessary 
and proper to obtrude explanatory notes and critical 
comments upon his readers, would have been not 
only without justification but without opportunity. 
But, unfortunately, this precious folio is one of the 
worst printed books that ever issued from the press. 
It is filled with the grossest possible errors in orthog- 



28 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

raphy, punctuation, and arrangement. It is not sur- 
prising that Mr. Collier estimates the corrections of 
* minor errors ' — that is, of mere palpable misspell- 
ing and mispunctuation — in his amended folio, at 
twenty thousand. The first folio must contain quite 
as many such blunders ; and the second is worse in 
this respect than the first. But, beside minor errors, 
the correction of which is obvious, words are so 
transformed as to be past recognition, even with the 
aid of the context ; lines are transposed ; sentences 
are sometimes broken by a full point followed 
by a capital letter, and other times have their 
members displaced and mingled in incomprehensi- 
ble confusion ; verse printed as prose, and prose 
as verse ; speeches belonging to one character 
are given to another ; and, in brief, all the 
possible varieties of typographical derangement 
abound in that volume, in the careful printing of 
which of all others, save one, the world was most 
interested. This it is which has made the labors of 
careful and learned editors necessary for "the text of 
Shakespeare ; and which has furnished the excuse 
for the exhibition of more pedantry, foolishness, con- 
ceit, and presumption than have been exhibited upon 
any other subject — always except that of religion." 
In the rectification of these errors, the commenta- 
tors have gone back to earlier editions of single plays 
for comparison, and to conjectural emendations based 
upon common sense, uncommon sense, and often 
upon nonsense. Every resource of antiquarian zeal, 
philological training, and contemporaneous illustra- 
tion has been invoked to redeem the text from its 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 29 

imperfections. That the result has not been fully 
attained as yet is only to say that human nature is 
fallible ; but we have to-day practically a far better 
expression of the poet's thought than could probably 
have been heard on any stagej and certainly than 
could have been read in any book or manuscript, 
existing in his lifetime, or until the present time. 

In academic instruction a much greater share is 
given to philological training, to the linguistics of 
the author, than would be practicable or profitable 
under other circumstances ; and even here it is often 
carried, as I have sometimes felt in my own teach- 
ing of college classes, further than is wise. For, 
however valuable verbal discipline may be to the 
scholar, it is very easy to sacrifice to it more im- 
portant considerations. The aesthetic value of the 
author and the artistic form of his work have a 
higher claim upon the attention of the student, while 
the psychological side of his dramatic personages 
and the evolution of character by touches which are 
consummate, because the perfection of the natural 
method in art and literature, demand our closest 
attention. Last and best, perhaps, is the ethical 
aspect, in which, viewing a play as an organic unit, 
we grasp its ethical content, that implicit moral prob- 
lem which, though not visibly exposed to the eye, 
strikes the mind and rings the tocsin of the heart 
and conscience like a fire alarm. Let us see how, 
taking up the study of Shakespeare's Plays, we may 
get at as much of all this as is possible under 
ordinarily favorable circumstances. 

In the first place, I should say, do not begin with 



30 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T. 

too wide a plan, unless everything concurs to for- 
ward your design. Recollect that an encyclopaedia, 
useful as it is for reference, is the worst text-book 
and the worst literature in the world, and that you 
get less of real history in a universal history than, I 
might say, in the biography of one great man — 
Caesar, or Cromwell, or Bonaparte, or Washington. 
If the student chance to be an ardent lover of that 
grand segment of English history which began with 
Runnymede and the Magna Charta, and closed with 
the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Rise of 
Democratic Thought, he may select for his study 
Shakespeare's magnificent cycle of historical dramas, 
and even supplement them with the Chronicle plays 
of his contemporaries, which fill the gaps he has 
left. In these can be traced English history from 
King John to Henry VIII., embodied in a stirring 
form of English literature ; and, if backed, verified, 
and corrected by a reasonable knowledge of the 
annals of the times, it will present to the mind a 
most vivid picture of the age of chivalry. The 
series is, in fact, though not in form, a grand trilogy, 
in which liberty lifts itself, like the rainbow's arch, 
from it^ rugged base of feudal privilege under the 
Plantagenets to its splendid culmination in the con- 
quest of France, and then declines to the catastrophe 
of despotism under the Tudors. In the blended 
colors of historic circumstance, personal interven- 
tion, and race-characteristics, we may trace the 
unerring curve of cause and consequence, and 
behold the national progress bridging with airy span 
the mental horizon, like a structure of the Gods set 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 31 

on high by the hand of destiny. This is a noble 
and suggestive course of study for the lover of 
history, I do not say it is the best, for the Roman 
Plays, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and 
Cleopatra afford an equal field of research and com- 
parative historical study, and in a finer form of 
literature than the English Chronicle Plays. Indeed, 
there is no single play w^hich has been more gener- 
ally used for educational purposes than Julius Caesar. 
While by no means the loftiest or most perfect type 
of Shakespeare's tragedy, it contains so many excel- 
lences that it is well fitted for a text-book in this 
department of study. Craik's "English of Shake- 
speare," Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar, Rolfe's, 
or the Clarendon, edition of the play, and numer- 
ous commentaries can be drawn into aids in this 
study. 

Suppose now we select Julius Caesar as our open- 
ing study, what is the first step to be taken ? To 
read it. Simple as this rule appears, it is not always 
followed; and the professor or lecturer often en- 
gages in the discussion of a play, known to his 
listeners only after the vaguest fashion. It is best 
for the learner to read it in his own way, at home, 
getting what he can out of it without too much effort, 
and laying hold on what most interests him indi- 
vidually. Then, when he comes to the audience 
chamber, the teacher can take him from one point 
of view to another, until the whole tragedy gathers 
form and rises before his vision like some fair city as 
seen from its acropolis. 

To the traveller who for the first time visits Rome 



32 THE PHOTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

the natural impulse must arise at once to ascend the 
Capitol, or St. Peter's dome, and with a sweep of the 
eye to take in the panorama of the ages, as marked 
out in the mouldering monuments at his feet. The 
mingled mass of ruins, relics, and recent structures 
would convey in some half-intelligible way a con- 
ception of the greatness and decay, the vicissitudes 
and vitality, of the Eternal City. Gradually his 
heart would become attuned to the key-note of fallen 
glory, to whose rhythm its history for fifteen cen- 
turies has been set ; and as his ear caught the far-off 
strains of imperial sway, and the still more distant 
martial music of republican masterhood, the whole 
orchestra of the past would burst upon his soul. 
Descending to its streets, he would stand in the 
Forum, traverse the ancient ways, gaze upon de- 
serted temples, arches of triumph, and a shattered 
Colosseum, until the deeds of kings, consuls, em- 
perors, and popes, and the words of poets, orators, 
historians, and philosophers, rose to his memory and 
grouped themselves into a perpetual pageant. Let 
him once again mount to his coign of vantage, and 
look down upon the maze below. With what an 
unsealed vision will he now survey the scene. An 
old, and an older, Rome rise before him like exhala- 
tions, and he sees each, concrete, definite, entire. 
Rome lives again. The analogy to the scholar who 
first approaches some masterpiece of literature with 
reverential eye is too close and too obvious to be 
disregarded. He first surveys, then studies in its 
details, and then groups into one broad, distinct, and 
powerful conception the entire work. It is thus that 




AND OTmS^'Wrn^M^A'^l^ PROBLEMS. -^^ 

a drama of Shakespeare may be mastered cind 
brought within our intellectual dominion. 

Hence it seems judicious first to read the play as a 
whole, taking in as much of it as the mind's eye 
can readily cover and understand with its unaided 
power. This reconnaissance made, we come down 
to our maps, and compare them critically with the 
topography and all its landmarks ; that is to say, we 
go to the sources of historical information from 
which Shakespeare wove the plot and evolved the 
drama, say, of Julius Caesar. These we find in the 
pages of Plutarch ; and cold, indeed, must be the 
imagination of the youth which does not kindle 
under the inspiration of the old Greek biographer 
and moralist. Yet in reading the Julius Caesar of 
Shakespeare and the lives of the Romans by Plu- 
tarch, one cannot but be struck with the immense 
difference between a man of first-rate talents and 
a man of genius ; though it would be fairer to say, 
between Shakespeare and any other writer. A por- 
traiture by Plutarch stands like the Parthenon, a per- 
fect building, in the cold gray of dawn ; but, when the 
sunlight of Shakespeare's creative force falls upon its 
front, from the Acropolis which serves as its pedestal 
to its very summit it glows with the divine splendor 
of intellectual illumination. 

Still, Plutarch's Lives cannot be called history, 
according to our modern philosophical and scientific 
conception of history, as actual fact permeated with 
essential truth. They are moral ideals illustrated by 
legendary pictures. If the purpose of the teacher 
embraces in its scope historical instruction, as has 

3 



34 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

generally been my own case, he may properly 
require some reading of the events of the Julian 
period from such manual as may be preferred, and, 
if possible, a rapid study of Froude's vivid biography 
of "the foremost man of all this world." Further, 
it will certainly be a great gain if the teacher can, 
during these studies, point out how nearly each 
author conforms to actual fact and how nearly to 
ideal verity, and, noting their discrepancies, invite 
inquiry and discussion of whatever questions may 
arise, great and small, whether it be the true charac- 
ters of the arch-conspirators, or even the names, 
spelling, and birthplaces of the more obscure. And 
here it may be added that this is not so much for 
the value of the facts themselves, as for their use as 
pegs to hang thoughts upon, links in the mnemotech- 
nic chain which binds together the whole body of 
the argument. 

It may properly be asked whether this method 
does not really violate the grand canon laid down 
in the beginning of this essay, that literature should 
be taught in literature, and not in what is said about 
it. There is danger of this, and it must be avoided. 
The excursions should be rapid and not too wide. 
But still, to see any object distinctly, to comprehend 
it fully, we must not be content with a glance or 
even a single view of it ; we must see it under every 
light and shadow, and from every point of view. 
And if we make our prime study of the play of 
Julius Caesar historical, it is because the author him- 
self conceives it as real history, though under some- 
what crude forms. On the other hand, in the study 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



35 



of other plays, such as the Tempest or As You 
Like It, the historical element may be very sum- 
marily dealt with, or even entirely neglected. 

Now, when we again take up the play, it is no 
longer a play ; it is a life. And it is not a screed 
about a life, but a live life being lived ; people plan- 
ning, plotting, striving, quarrelling, killing, and dying 
greatly and nxDbly. As then we proceed to review 
the drama, scene by scene and act by act, the ques- 
tion continually arises, what bearing has this wprd, 
or passage, or rendering on the theories, political, 
ethical, or psychological, which have been engaging 
our attention. Comment, suggestion, and inquiry 
should invite the student to the contemplation and 
^solution of these. Was Caesar's usurpation neces- 
sary or justifiable.? Was his genius for destruction 
or for organization .? By what casuistry do the 
champions of de jure and de facto governments vin- 
dicate the protagonists of the Roman Common- 
wealth .? Was Csesar rightfully slain ? Should Brutus 
have died as he did .? What was Caesar's appari- 
tion ? But it is not necessary to multiply these 
questions. They will occur to each one according 
to his mental constitution or education. Their con- 
sideration and solution set the student thinking, and 
develop the power to originate and discuss, which is 
one grand object of literary culture. 

By this time each student has his theory, right 
or wrong, of the whole play. In working out 
the details, the language has become familiar 
by repeated reference. Unconsciously almost, the 
reader has caught the spirit of the play, and the 



36 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

words which embody it rise naturally to his lips. 
-But they rise, not with parrot-like iteration, but as 
the expression of kindling thought. The time has 
now arrived for the student to formulate his views in 
well-considered essays, and to become familiar with 
the beauty, force, and fitness of the more splendid 
or significant passages, sounding their depths, and 
plucking out the very heart of their mystery. 

During the whole of the aforementioned course 
of instruction the philological value of particular 
words, and their history and use, may be brought 
under discussion. With such a text-book in hand as 
Craik's English of Shakespeare, the danger is of 
doing too much rather than too little of this sort of 
work. To allure the student into paths of English 
philology, not to exact from him a formal task 
therein, but still more to elucidate the text, should 
be the teacher's object. Hence, these investiga- 
tions should be incidental, and not as the goal of 
steady effort. 

It is not too much to say that a body of students 
will rise from a study of Julius Cassar according to 
the method I have sketched, not only enlightened 
by valuable information and fuller knowledge of how 
to obtain it, but with a larger view of the value of 
literature itself and keener appetite for its pursuits ; 
in a word, liberalized, set free from that thraldom to 
the letter which kills high thought, and with their 
feet set in the right path toward a true culture. 

I might here pause, as the foregoing illustrates 
one method of studying Shakespeare, which has 
greatly commended itself to me. But it may be 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 37 

well to remark that each play must be studied with 
reference to its centre of interest, and with a treat- 
ment varying according to its central idea. Guided 
by this canon, the reader, if his taste or fancy 
attracts him to the comedy rather than the tragedy 
of Shakespeare, will find therein a wonderfully wide 
range of character, incident, and eloquent or witty 
speech, and always, too, a central or dominant idea 
that will repay his search. The Merchant of Venice 
oscillates between extremes, from the tender dal- 
liance of moonlit lovers to the perilous verge of 
intensest tragic motive, while, in elaborating its plan 
of construction, Gervinus traces through the tangle 
of its plots a design arabesque in its intricacy. As 
You Like It has been made familiar to lovers of the 
stage by many charming actresses, and the melan- 
choly Jaques, with his pessimistic meditations, is 
better known than any actual gentleman of his day. 
And under the airy movement and poetic concep- 
tion of the Tempest is veiled a very mine of spiri- 
tual force, as the summer cloud is charged with the 
electric bolt. 

Still guided by this canon, we may, for instance, 
take up that superb Quadrilateral of Tragedy, whose 
grim bastions frown down upon all ads^enture that 
would scale their impregnable ramparts ; for Lear, 
Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet still stand as the very 
citadel of Shakespeare's fame. In these, as in most 
of Shakespeare's tragedies, we may discover the 
normal evolution of the plot, as pointed out by 
Gervinus, and which must have been suggested by 
an unerring instinct of genius to Shakespeare. The 



38 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 



natural movement and process of tragedy is from 
cause to crisis, and from crisis to catastrophe. A 
triangle, or perhaps an arch, as suggested by Ger- 
vinus, will fairly present the development of the 
tragic process from cause to catastrophe. 



Crisis. 




The first two acts should exhibit the moral and 
intellectual conflict between opposing motives, ■ 
which ought naturally to culminate near the middle 
of the third act, or centre of a play, in a decisive 
deed, the consequences of which should, in the 
latter half of the tragedy, show its necessary effect in 
the final catastrophe. The opening scenes display 
the persons of the drama, and lay down the condi- 
tions of the plot. The controlling motive should 
there develop itself, leading the protagonist, or hero, 
to that event which constitutes the crisis of the 
action, and which, under the decision of his free- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 39 

will, becomes a destiny to him. He has by his own 
deeds made a bed, and must lie in it. He has dug a 
pit, and he will fall into it. He has set toils, and he 
cannot escape from them. As a chief interest in the 
causative, or early, half of the tragedy is in observ- 
ing the oscillation of the balance, the scruple that 
decides the tempted man in making choice of his 
course, so in the last two acts we are aroused to 
a still keener curiosity, and perhaps sympathy, in 
watching his struggle to escape from the conse- 
quences of his act, or in witnessing the silent and 
inevitable steps by which, guiding his descent to 
the catastrophe. Nemesis exacts her penalty, through 
expiation or destruction. 

In a drama thus constructed, the attention is kept 
aroused, the sense of symmetry is satisfied by a just 
balance of the parts, and the moral lesson which is 
the ultimate purpose of the tragedy is duly and 
clearly enforced. Shakespeare, with all his alleged 
disregard for form, preserves, as a rule, the sense of 
moral proportion in his plays by an adherence to 
this canon of dramatic construction, constituting, as 
it does, the fundamental and only genuine unity in 
the playwright's art. 

In Macbeth and Hamlet the historical and mythi- 
cal element admit and require some discussion, but 
the main interest centres on their psychology, and 
this has been illustrated by so many hands as to 
demand here a mere allusion. The reaction of 
motive and deed upon character, resulting in conse- 
quences which form the staple of the drama, will, in 
these tragedies, employ the powers of instructor and 



40 i^iii' PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

disciple in the work of analysis, and finally in that 
supreme effort of reconstruction which beholds the 
spiritual image that is mirrored in the incidents of 
the play, and evolves its moral purpose from shadowy 
belongings. 

The artistic beauty and wonderful imagery of these 
tragedies are brought out in their full force while 
following the clue of character woven into their 
royal drapery ; and tangled and perhaps insoluble 
mysteries of human destiny are proposed, which 
test and measurably baffle our curiosity and subtle 
questioning. 

In the short course of lectures which I purpose to 
give, it is possible to approach the study of the 
Shakespearian drama from only one or two sides. 
If broader aspects of the theme are desired, as they 
certainly are most desirable, they are at hand in the 
most alluring form, and can be found in the essays 
of Hudson, Whipple, Lowell, Richard Grant White, 
Charles Knight, and many others. 

The lectures following will be confined to a single 
one on Macbeth, in which its ethical aspects are 
more particularly treated, and five lectures on Ham- 
let, which I hope may not prove unacceptable to the 
lovers of the nobler forms of the drama. If they 
shall stimulate thought, invite inquiry, and lead to a 
more correct appreciation of our greatest poet, their 
object will have been answered. 

Personally, I am amply rewarded if I can in the 
least do my part to stir the teeming literary aspira- 
tion of New Orleans to a calm and loving survey of 
the higher walks of literature. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 41 



MACBETH. 

"Thriftless ambition that will ravin up 
Thine own life's means." 

Macbeth, II., 4. 

Know thyself. Such is the mandate of the best 
Greek philosophy, and such the mandate of the last 
scientific criticism. We all desire knowledge, and 
this self-knowledge especially invites our inquiry. 
But there is no algebra of the understanding which 
has formulated the spiritual nature in abstract terms. 
Our only really valuable knowledge of the imma- 
terial spirit comes to us in a different way. It breaks 
upon us, as we get out of the darkness into the light, 
by looking steadily at man — at his spiritual essence, 
as it is manifested all about us, in the meanest as 
well as in the greatest. And we grasp this knowl- 
edge in its fulness by looking at this poor human 
soul, not under the glare of artificial lights, but in the 
softened glow of God's own sunshine, under the 
chastening influence of that sweet charity which 
is the divinest of our faculties. This light of intelli- 
gence, and this sweetness of charity together consti- 
tute that culture which sums up modern philosophic 
education. 

It is not for all of us, or any of us, to walk in the 



4 J THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

full light of the meridian sun ; perhaps it is not best 
for us so to do ; but still we must seek for light 
everywhere. One of our best aids in this acquisi- 
tion of self-knowledge, this clear conception of the 
human soul, is found in literature. ( I mean by litera- 
ture the message of one man's genius to all men's 
hearts^ The great masters, the leaders of thought, 
the princes and pontiffs of poesy a«d philosophy, the 
bards and sages, have each their message, fire-winged 
and voiceful, which summons its circle of disciples, 
and creates its school or sect. Take Homer, and 
now, twenty-five centuries having passed, we see 
Great Britain's Prime Ministers, Gladstone, master of 
finance, leaving his budget to explain the intricacies 
of Homeric thought, and Derby, the sturdy states- 
man, translating the resounding lines of the Iliad 
into English verse ; and Pope and Cowper, and 
Lang, and our American Bryant, and a hundred 
more, each making his own version of the father of 
song. Think how Aristotle has swayed the minds of 
age after age of reasoners, and how Plato still asserts 
a claim to dominion wherever philosophy lifts her 
eyes to the stars. But I may not dwell too long on 
this quickening power of literature, with its divine 
messages to the human race, lest I be drawn aside 
from the sp. („.al subject of this essay. 

When we look abroad through the wide provinces 
of literature for a man to whom all concede that 
divine insight into the human soul which is the real 
definition of genius, and from whose words we may 
catch its inspiration, and obtain that self-knowledge 
which is literature's highest function, common 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 43 

acclaim, the voice of the many and the voice of the 
mighty, accords a supreme excellence to Shake- 
speare. Critic and philosopher and poet unite in 
assigning to " the poor player" a seat in the trium- 
virate of the world's greatest thinkers. In the very 
slag and cinder of his volcanic genius lie embedded 
precious bits of moral truth and sparkling gems of 
thought, but his greatest creations have become our 
' ideals of philosophy and art. 

Time forbids that I should enter here on any 
extended discussion of the characteristics of the man 
Shakespeare and of his genius. But it is a pleasant 
thought that enough of him is known to leave the 
image of a calm and genial man, whose broad 
humanity was lit up by the sunshine of a cheerful, 
happy temper. His intellect was subtle, playful, and 
capacious ; and Coleridge told but half the tale when 
he named him "the myriad-minded." In the radiant 
circle of Elizabethan dramatists, each a star of the 
first splendor, he was the central sun. He is the 
greatest of English poets. - ' 

The Elizabethan drama was the natural outgrowth 
of previous literary and social conditions, and the 
highest legitimate embodiment of the poetry of the 
age. It was not an accidental or conventional mode 
of expression with Shakespeare and his contempo- 
raries, but the normal, necessary and spontaneous 
image of their minds. With his grand imagination, 
his all-embracing sympathy with man and nature, 
and his wonderful and intuitive insight into the 
human hoart, he was enabled, in his own language, 
" to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature ; to show 



44 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the 
very age and body of the time his form and pressure." 
Thus Shakespeare's pecuHar gift is not to analyze, 
not to describe, but to reflect, as the pohshed crystal, 
all that passes before its magic surface. As you look 
therein the phantom passions and spectral imagin- 
ings which have haunted the habitations of your 
own heart rise in visible form to warn, to ennoble, 
and to redeem it. The guilty Lady Macbeth cries 
to her lord : 

" Your face, my thane, is as a book where men 
May read strange matters." 

Your hearts, my hearers, are as a book writ with 
stranger matters still ; and this master-magician 
holds it up that you may read therein. 

The great poet uses his mother tongue as an 
instrument of such volume, range, and melody that 
his readers are continually tempted to string those 
pearls of language, which we call "the beauties of 
Shakespeare." And yet this is but his smallest 
function. It is as psychologist, philosopher, and 
master of the problems of the human heart that we 
must regard him, as we reverently approach the 
study of his mighty tragedies. 

The dramas of Shakespeare make up a psychology 
none the less complete because it is concrete in its 
forms. Opinions vary as to which is the greatest of 
his works. But this is a question of little practical 
moment. In each, the form and the play of thought 
are exactly fitted to the spiritual conception which is 
the central idea of the drama. In the skill and sub- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



45. 



tlety with which the moral powers and manifold 
intellectual activities of man are manifested to the 
mind's eye, and in the philosophy of life, Hamlet is 
peerless and perennial. And still other plays of the 
master- workman evince his versatility, resources, 
and imagination, and his complete control over the 
materials, methods, and instrumentalities of his 
magic art. But Macbeth is his greatest poem. 

That I am not unsupported in this position, I quote 
Hallam, who says: "The majority of readers, I 
believe, assign to Macbeth the pre-eminence among 
the works of Shakespeare ; many, however, would 
rather name Othello, and a few might prefer Lear to 
either. The great epic drama, as the first may be 
called, deserves, in my own judgment, the post it 
has attained, as being, in the language of Drake, 
' the greatest effort of our author's genius, the most 
sublime and impressive drama which the world has 
ever beheld.'" Nor are Drake and the judicious 
Hallam alone in this opinion. Campbell, in his life 
of Mrs. Siddons, says: "I regard Macbeth, upon 
the whole, as the greatest treasure of our dramatic 
literature." Gervinus, the great German commenta- 
tor, says: "It stands forth uniquely pre-eminent in 
the splendors of poetic and picturesque diction, and 
in the living representation of persons, times, and 
places." 

Whether Macbeth is the greatest of Shakespeare's 
plays or not, I think there can be no doubt that it is 
his greatest poem. This is the more remarkable as 
it is probable from internal evidences that it never 
received the finishing touches so necessary for the 



46 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

perfection of a work of art, but stands like some 
colossal statue — the dream of a seer — the stupendous 
outline of a great soul-study, conceived in its entirety 
in the mind of the artist We discover gaps in the 
plot, confusion in the metaphor, details half com- 
pleted, and a lack of those final thoughts which, like 
sweetest roses before a killing frost, blossomed forth 
in his last version of Hamlet. But this very incom- 
pleteness compels us, as it were, to enter the charmed 
circle of the poet's imaginings, view the author's 
mind in the processes of creation, and share with 
him in the solemn mystery of the production of this 
grand drama. 

It may be, as Swinburne suggests, "that the sole 
text we possess of Macbeth has not been interpolated, 
but mutilated." He describes it as " piteously rent 
and ragged and clipped and garbled in some of its 
earlier scenes ; the rough construction and the polt- 
foot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each 
maimed and mangled subject of players' and printers' 
most treasonable tyranny contending as it were to 
seem harsher than the other." Yet, along with the 
wise and deep-seeing authors before cited, this most 
musical of critics tells us, "But if Othello be the 
most pathetic. King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet 
the subtlest and deepest, work of Shakespeare, the 
highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy 
is Macbeth." 

In the spirit of this suggestion I am prepared to 
admit that Macbeth may he (for I dread dogmatism) 
rather the torso of some masterpiece of our dramatic 
Phidias than the uncompleted ideal of his tragic 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



47 



muse. But dropping metaphor, the greatness of the 
events, the rapidity of the action, the compression of 
the thought, the fervor of the diction, and the sim- 
plicity and directness of the moral movement, render 
it a noble example of tragic art. Macbeth is not 
only, as Hallam called it, the great epic drama, but 
also the great heroic drama. The action is shrouded 
in mysterious gloom, or lurid with an unholy super- 
natural light ; the persons of the drama move in 
shadow, vast, sombre and majestic, like beings of 
some older and larger creation. As in the Iliad, 
Achilles, Ulysses, and Agamemnon deal with the 
Immortals, give the sword-thrust or receive the 
wound, so when Banquo and stout Macduff, the 
saintly Duncan and bloody Macbeth, enter the field 
of vision, the meaner race of mortals vanishes from 
sight. Hence the artistic effects of thi;. play are not 
produced by nice gradations of shade, but by strong 
contrasts of color in scene, incidents, circumstance 
and character. The elements are in tumult ; and the 
landscape, black beneath the lowering storm-cloud, 
is, nevertheless, belted with peaceful bands of sun- 
shine. Fell murder and dire cruelty work out their 
purposes on innocence and loyalty, and final retri- 
bution is met " dareful, beard to beard" by defiant 
remorse. Macbeth, is indeed, a tremendous epic in 
dramatic form — an epic in the rush and swirl of its 
objective action, but a very paean of subjective evo- 
lution struck from the fervid lyre of a heart white hot. 
But implicit wdthin the folds of its royal drapery of 
poetry, indeed, at the very heart of its ancient legend, 
couches one of the problems of destiny — a mystery 



48 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

of the human soul — which we would do well to 
pluck forth, and lay bare to the scrutiny of our 
intelligence. 

I have not selected this tragedy because its prob- 
lem is the most difficult to solve, for, on the con- 
trary, it is the most obvious ; but it is one of the 
grandest and most pathetic. It is the old story of 
temptation, crime and retributive justice. Hamlet 
and Macbeth were finished almost about the same 
time ; Hamlet, as an idea which had grown through 
a series of years and been worked out to its consum- 
mation ; and Macbeth, probably suggested by it, 
hurled from the crater of the author's imagination 
into the empyrean. Together they constitute the 
obverse and reverse of the heaven-stamped medal we 
call the human will. They are psychological com- 
plements of each other. In Hamlet the reiiunciation 
of the human will is balanced by the despotism of 
will in Macbeth. In Hamlet, "the courtier, soldier, 
scholar, the expectancy and rose of the fair state," is 
"quite, quite down" — and why.? Because, a morbid 
conscience and irresolute heart keep his subtle intel- 
lect in play, until the moment for action has passed, 
and his vacillation overwhelms with ruin all his 
house. But the Thane of Glamis, audacious, merci- 
less and prompt, closes with his opportunity, and on 
the instant puts his soul past surgery. All must bend 
or break before the energy of his tremendous will 
and his lawless lust of dominion. But Nemesis fol- 
lows him too, and his crime works out its inevitable 
penalty. 

But let us come now to the play itself, and consider 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



49 



the material and web of the plot, and how its moral 
purpose is evolved, A mediaeval legend from Hol- 
inshed's dry Chronicle furnishes the incidents of the 
story. Following this outline, but weaving into it 
striking features from other similar tales, the author 
wins the credence of his audience by an apparent 
adherence to historical fact ; while his perfect dra- 
matic instinct teaches him to produce the profoundest 
impressions by conforming these rigid materials to 
the standard of ideal, universal, essential truth. Here 
is the story of Macbeth : Duncan, the saintly, but 
feeble, King of Scotland, is assailed by rebellion and 
invasion, which are repelled by his two generals, 
Macbeth and Banquo, who win public commendation 
and the rewards of the King. While returning from 
victory, they meet upon a blasted heath the three 
Weird Sisters, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, 
Thane of Cawdor, and King of Scotland hereafter, 
and predict for Banquo that his offspring shall ascend 
the throne. Banquo's sturdy honesty rejects the bait, 
but Macbeth's restless ambition hovers around the 
unholy prediction. The messengers of the King 
meet him, and announce that the King has given 
Him the titles and estates of the rebellious and van- 
quished Thane of Cawdor. Already, by inheritance, 
he was Thane of Glamis. 

" Two truths are told, as happy prologues to the 
swelling act of the imperial theme." 

A fiendish suggestion has planted in his breast a 
wicked thought. He entertains it there, and it gathers 
and grows into a purpose to fulfill the prophecy. 
While this is taking shape, a fatal hint infuses the 

4 



50. THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 

poison of lawless ambition into the veins of his wife, 
and the "dear partner of his greatness" becomes the 
partner of his guilt. When he hesitates, she urges 
him to the execution of the crime, through which 
he will ascend the throne. He avails himself of a 
friendly visit of the King to murder him ; and then, 
to conceal his own guilt, stabs the sleeping chamber- 
lains. Duncan's sons, alarmed for their safety, fly. 
Macbeth charges them with the murder, and himself 
ascends the throne. His usurpation now seems es- 
tablished, and all goes well with him ; but he cannot 
feel secure while Banquo lives, for Banquo witnessed 
his temptation and may profit by his crime, while his 
stainless integrity stands like a perpetual reproach to 
Macbeth's disloyalty and guilt. He must die. Ban- 
quo is waylaid and assassinated; but his " blood- 
boltered " ghost rises at a royal banquet to shake the 
soul of Macbeth with horror. In his desperate desire 
to search out the future, the murderous usurper seeks 
the witches, and, lured by their infernal lights, he 
butchers in cold blood the wife and children of Mac- 
duff, Thane of Fife, who has fled to the true prince, 
Malcolm, in England. But this cruelty does not 
prosper. Suspicion, hatred and horror follow him. 
His wife, pursued by remorse, kills herself. And at 
last, cheated by the fiends he trusted, the tyrant falls 
in battle by the hand of Macduff, and the son of the 
murdered Duncan ascends the throne. From these 
simple materials, the skilful hand and informing spirit 
of the great artist built up a royal palace in the realm 
of thought. 
The felicity of Shakespeare's genius shows itself in 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 51 

the selection of the time and place and plot of this 
tragedy. Surely, these are not accidents. The venue 
is laid in the border-land of fact and fable. Macbeth 
was a contemporary of that Edward the Confessor 
whose reign lingered for generations in the fancy of 
Saxon England as a golden age. It was to Shake- 
speare a heroic age ; and the figures and events of his 
creation loom up loftily through twilight and mist, 
too large and vague perhaps, did not human passions 
so sharply define them. 

But the place as well as the time of the drama evoke 
a vivid interest. Scotland, though neighboring, was 
yet almost unknown to Englishmen of that day, and 
a series of tragic events and the calamities of kings 
had just linked its history with that of England.* 

* It has been ingeniously maintained, and not without considerable 
evidence, that Shakespeare visited in person the scene of the action 
in Macbeth. Among other curious proofs is a letter quoted in the 
Athaeneum (No. 2830, January 21, 1882). This letter is published 
by Mr. Edward J. L. Scott. 

British Museum, Jan. 17, 1882. 

I have lately come across (in a volume of correspondence between 
the English and Scotch courts during the negotiations for the mar- 
riage of James VI. and Anne of Denmark) a letter of surpassing 
interest as regards the whereabouts of Shakespeare between 1587, 
the date when he left Stratford enrolled as a member of Burbage's 
company of players, called the Queen's company, and 1591, the 
date of his beginning to write alone as an author (see Fleay's Shake- 
speare Manual, pp. 4 and 5). 

The letter, which I here subjoin, is from Henry le Scrope, ninth 
Baron Scrope of Bolton, Governor of Carlisle and Warden of the 
West Marches, to William Asheby, English ambassador at the court 
of James VI. : 

" After my verie hartie comendacion on a letter receyved from 



52 . THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

James I. had but just come to the throne; and, to 
Southern eyes Scotland lay like a mountain lake, half 
robed in romance and half veiled in mystery. Under 
the enchanter's wand, this gloomy background faded 
into a land of shadows, the -curtain of the unseen 
world was lifted, and the powers of the air mingled 
with human actors as persons of the drama. 

The staple of the story, too, is not without strong 
parallelisms to events which had recently greatly 
excited the public mind. Earl Gowrie's conspiracy, 
aimed at the life of James I., was still fresh in the 
memories of men. The plots known as "the Main" 

Mr. Roger Asheton, signifying unto me that yt was the kinges 
earnest desire for to have her majesties players for to repayer into 
Scotland to his grace ; 

" I dyd furthwith dispatche a servant of my owen onto them 
wheir they were in the furthest part of Langkenshire, wheropon 
they made their returne heather to Carliell, wher they are and have 
stayed for the space of ten dayes, wherof I thought good to gyve 
you notice in respect of the great desyre that the kyng had to have 
the same to come onto his grace ; and withall to praye yow to give 
knowledg therof to his Majestie. So for the present, I bydd yow 
right heartihe farewell. 

" Carlisle, the XXth of September, 1589. 

" Your verie assured loving friend, 

" H. SCROPE." 

There is no further letter relating to the subject among Asheby's 
correspondence, but it is very interesting to think that Shakespeare 
visited Edinburgh at the very time when the witches were tried and 
burned for raising the storms that drowned Jane Kennedy, mistress 
of the robes to the new queen, and imperilled the life of Anne of 
Denmark herself. 

Mr. Scott adds : "In that case the witches in "Macbeth " must 
have had their origin from the actual scenes witnessed by the player 
So many years previously to the writing of that drama in 1606." 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 53 

and "the Bye," for the murder of the king and the 
enthronement of his cousin, Arabella Stuart, had 
lately occurred ; and the trials of Sir Walter Raleigh 
and others, had awakened the liveliest interest touch- 
ing regicide ' and the breach of a clear title to the 
crown. If, as best conjectured, this play was com- 
pleted early in 1606, then it came just on the heel of 
the Gunpowder Plot, which had been fixed for No- 
vember 5th, 1605 ; and the trials of the wretched 
fanatics who had compassed the destruction of King 
and Parliament had made the popular mind familiar 
with projects of slaughter and the casuistry of assas- 
sination. Shakespeare's treatment of his theme com- 
mended itself not only to the prince, but to the people ; 
and while he adapted it to the spirit of the age, and 
even to the passing mood of the public, he evinced 
his transcendent genius by producing a poem of 
perennial interest, the spectacle of a titanic nature 
utterly cast down and ruined in its great spiritual 
struggle. Neither in prologue, nor in epilogue, nor 
in the mouth of any interlocutor, does the author 
announce the moral of the play. Yet he who runs 
may read. It is the contest for the soul of a man. 
The powers of darkness wrestle with and vanquish 
him. 

We can properly understand this tragedy only by 
first understanding its supernaturalism. To do this 
aright we must look at it from the author's stand- 
point. There is scarcely any subject in literature 
more fascinating than the study of post-mediaeval 
supernaturalism as embodied in the plays of Shake- 
speare. This is an age and country of a skepticism 



54 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

SO general and pervading- that we find it hard to con- 
ceive of the immense mass of superstition which 
overlaid the Christianity of the Middle Ages. Folk- 
lore, the hierarchy of angels and demons, the realm 
of faery, the habits and manners of ghosts ; witch- 
craft with its laws, customs, cultus, and criminal 
practices ; auguries, oracles, sorcery and other mani- 
festations of occult power ; spells, talismans, elixirs, 
and alchemy conjuring with the unknown and un- 
subdued forces of nature ; astrology and the influence 
of the stars ; the meaning of dreams and visions ; 
in a word the whole world of the unreal had been 
systematized into a complete code and body of su- 
pernatural mythology, believed alike by peasant and 
prince, by learned and unlearned, and by all classes 
of the community. Relics of this remain imbedded 
in our earlier literature, like flies in amber ; and other 
relics still yet crop out in the fancies, the follies and 
the crimes of the present generation. This vast ma- 
chinery of mythology, which then represented to the 
popular mind the secondary causes through which 
God governs his universe, seems to us but the kalei- 
doscopic phases of a disordered dream, a mirage, 
"an unsubstantial pageant." But to our ancestors it 
was as real and solid as the rock-ribbed earth. 

In Shakespeare's day, the British people was in the 
prime of national manhood. The light was breaking, 
and the emancipated human intellect was waking 
from the dreams of a thousand years. The prophetic 
soul of Shakespeare accepted the popular beliefs as 
modes of expression, and employed them as symbols 
for the unseen forces of nature and spirit, in which 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 55 

dwell activities more potent than even superstition 
could conjure up. And it was through this high 
poetic and philosophic power, this eminent gift of 
imagination and understanding working together, 
that he produced the terrible and highly idealized 
conception of supernatural agency embodied in the 
Weird Sisters. These and Banquo's ghost, the ap- 
paritions, the omens, the air-drawn dagger, the mys- 
terious voice, are but the signs and formulas through 
which he represents the problem of evil, with which 
Macbeth grapples, and which he solves to his own 
temporal and eternal ruin. 

A canon of Shakespeariap criticism, somewhat 
fanciful perhaps, has been advanced, that the first 
scene, or even the first words, of a play, will often 
strike the keynote of the entire action. In Macbeth, 
certainly, they have a curious significance. The en- 
chanter waves his wand, and the tragedy begins. 
Where? " In a desert place, " or "open place," as 
some will have it ; " with thunder and lightning. " 
Is it on land or sea, or do the witches "hover 
through the fog and filthy air .? " Whether we picture 
it as a barren heath, or above the ferment of the 
deep, we know that "the secret, black and midnight 
hags " are gathered on the confines of hell, with the 
gates ajar. Amid the tumult of the elements, and 
the mutterings of familiar spirits, the ominous ques- 
tion is shrieked forth, 

" When shall we three meet again ? " 

This is answered by these "juggling fiends," when 
they next appear as tempters of Macbeth. The fine, 



56 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

lyrical movement of the scene reaches its highest 
pitch in the diabolic suggestion of the chorus, 

" Fair is foul, and foul is fair." 

This phrase symbolizes the reversal of the divine 
order of nature, the love of evil for its own sake, the 
unforgivable sin. That this is not a mere conceit is 
evinced by the very first words that Macbeth utters, 

" So foul and fair a day I have not seen." 

This is the human response to the infernal sugges- 
tion, and points to the moral confusion which infects 
the fairest state of man. This cannot be accidental. 
It is but one instance among many in Shakespeare 
where the echo of the mysterious footfall of the 
future is heard by an inner sense, and the word of 
unconscious prophecy is uttered. By this I do not 
mean that those omens and prodigies cited after 
Duncan's death, nor the predictions of the witches, 
but something subtler, akin to the derided and dreaded 
presentiment of evil. 

Attention has been called to Shakespeare's art in 
opening the play with words that are in fact a pre- 
lude to its action. 

A curious illustration of the ineptitude of much of 
the comment and emendation of Shakespeare will be 
seen in the following extract from "Story's Qpnver- 
sations in a Studio." (Vol. i, p. 94) showing how 
another poet can stumble as to this very opening. 

"Nothing can be more absurd in many respects 
than Burger's translation of ' Macbeth. ' Poet, though 
he was, he seems to have lost all sense of poetry or 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 57 

reason in this translation, in which, in fact, he so 
ludicrously travesties the original, that one cannot 
but smile at the absurdities he introduces. The fact 
is, that Burger, who was a very vain man, thought 
himself far superior to Shakespeare, and kindly 
assisted him, and eked out his shortcomings. Think 
of this opening in ' Macbeth ' : — 

' Soldier. Hold ! not in such a hurry, good sir. 
Guard. Now, then ? 

Soldier. I prithee, what is it you will tell the king ? 
Guard. That the battle is won. 
Soldier. But I have been lying. 

Guard. Lying rascal ! Then thou art indeed with thy wounds 
a desperate joker. 

This is a literal translation of one of Burger's im- 
provements to Shakespeare. " 

An instance of the dramatic second-sight mentioned 
above is exhibited in Duncan's comment on the ac- 
count of Cawdor's repentant death : — ■ 

" There's no art 
To find the mind's construction in the face ; 
He was a gentleman on whom I built 
An absolute trust — ' ' 

Just here the new Thane of Cawdor enters with 
murder and treason in his heart, interrupting the 
reflection, while the king verifies and exemplifies in 
his words and conduct the aphorism he has just 
uttered. 

Again, where Banquo for the last time leaves the 
King, he says : 

" A heavy summons lies Hke lead upon me, 
And yet I would not sleep." 



58 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

Here there is something more than meets the ear, 
for the next moment Macbeth, charged with mur- 
derous purpose, greets him. In act i, scene 2, 
Duncan begins, " What bloody man is this ? " On 
this Bodenstadt comments, "This word 'bloody' 
reappears on almost every page, and runs like a red 
thread through the whole piece. In no other of 
Shakespeare's dramas is it so frequent." Again, 
Macbeth, while plotting Banquo's murder, urges him 
to attend the banquet. " Fail not our feast," he 
says. Banquo's promise, "My Lord, I will not," is 
fulfilled in a sense unexpected by either, or by the 
reader, when his " blood-boltered " ghost rises at the 
appointed place to shake with horror the marble heart 
of merciless Macbeth. Our secret sins find us out. 
Retribution is the debt never repudiated. The devil 
keeps his appointments. 

The manner in which our poet has portrayed the 
Weird Sisters is but a solitary proof among many 
how far he was superior in real moral insight to the 
greatest even of the great poets who are sometimes 
named with him. Milton, most learned and religious, 
most metaphysical and most musical of poets, con- 
ceives Satan as the archangel ruined, who wins our 
human sympathy by the dazzling sublimity of his 
superhuman pride and despair. But Shakespeare's 
clearer and nobler perception of the essential ugli- 
ness and deformity of sin compels him to strike 
nearer the truth. The Weird Sisters, who embody the 
idea of evil, are beastly and loathsome, as well as 
terrible. 

The beings called in this tragedy "the Weird Sis- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



59 



ters" are not the malignant, yet impotent, old witches 
against whom the royal demonologist levelled the 
statute of 1604, Nor are they mere abstractions, per- 
sonifications of the wicked promptings of Macbeth's 
heart. Though " bubbles of the air," they are not 
"fantastical." Real essences, prompters of sin, min- 
isters of the evil one, and, like the Scandinavian 
Valkyrias, " posters of the land and sea," they brood 
over fields of slaughter, stir the elements to strife, 
and derange the moral and material order of the 
world. Such tasks are the work of strong fiends ; 
but, as if in illustration of the essential connection of 
all evil, they do its drudgery with zeal. They mix 
the hell-broth of foul, venomous things, inflict and 
gloat over pain and misery, and yet are full of petty 
spite and filthiness. They are tempters to sin and 
can produce human suffering ; but they have no com- 
pulsion for the soul, and recoil baffled from the 
assault on innocence. When the Weird Sisters struck 
the chord of unlawful aspiration in the bosom of 
Macbeth, it swelled into a symphony of treason and 
murder. But no irresistible necessity constrained 
him. Not fate, but his own free will, determined his 
downward career. And this is shown in that con- 
summate touch of art by which Banquo is placed by 
the side of Macbeth and subjected to similar tempta- 
tions, yet preserves his integrity unsullied, and dies a 
martyr to his loyalty. The mousing owls of Satan, 
the revolting caricature of humanity in its possible 
degradation, have merely to offer Macbeth the vast 
suggestion, and its echoes reverberate through his 
hollow and arid heart, until unhallowed reverie grows 



6o THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

into guilty intention, and this ripens into crime. 
Thomas a — Kempis says well : 

"For first a bare thought comes to the mind ; then 
a strong imagination ; afterwards delight, and evil 
motion and consent." So was it with Macbeth. He 
withstood not the beginnings of evil, and the end 
was utter ruin. 

A true conception of the character of Macbeth, in 
whose soul the strife is waged, is necessary to grasp 
the real purpose of the play. This we may learn 
from the estimate put upon him by the popular voice, 
by his intimates, and by her to whom he had re- 
vealed "the naked frailties " of his soul. His solilo- 
quies, too, unlock secret chambers into which the 
observer looks with sidelong glances. There he dis- 
cerns the difference between this man before and 
after temptation, which, at the last, is the immeas- 
urable distance between innocence and guilt, between 
a soul under probation and a soul betrayed and lost. 

When the play opens he was to his followers and 
peers, "brave Macbeth," "valor's minion," "Bel- 
lona's bridegroom." The King calls him "valiant 
cousin," "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," 
"peerless kinsman." In his own words, he had 

"Bought 
Golden opinions from all sorts of people." 

His wife, who thought she knew the man, says of 
him in her first soliloquy : 

' ' Yet do I fear thy nature. 
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness 
To catch the nearest way : thou would 'st be great ; 
Art not without ambition, but without 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 6 1 

The illness should attend it ; what thou wouldst highly, 
That wouldst thou holily ; wouldst not play false, 
And yet would'st wrongly win." 

With full allowance for the energy of the speaker's 
passion and ambition, this careful analysis portrays 
a mixed character. Macbeth's own ideal of himself 
is lofty : 

" I dare do all that may become a man ; 
Who dares do more is none." 

The air-drawn dagger and the voice that "cried 
to all the house," echoes of a conscience, startled 
and aghast, are proofs of an imagination both sensi- 
tive and magnificent, even were the thoughts not 
uttered in heroic vein. But then, again, this capa- 
cious nature is cankered by selfishness. 

There is in Macbeth's language a very distinct in- 
dividualization, characteristically Shakespearian. His 
conversation is marked by a direct energy and blunt 
brevity, not uncommon with men of action, used to 
command. Like a true master of fence, reticence 
is his guard. He comes to the point without parley, 
and keeps at bay his fellow-men. But, on the other 
hand, in self-communion, and in converse with that 
other self, his wife, his imagination lifts itself in 
widening circles, like the eagle's flight, to its pride of 
place. After the murder, he replies to the salu- 
tations of the Thanes :• 

" Good morrow, both. 

Macduff.— Is the King stirring, worthy Thane ? 
Macbeth. — Not yet. 

Macduff. — He did command me to call timely on him. 
I have almost slipped the hour . 



62 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 

Macbeth. — I'll bring you to him. 
Lennox. — Goes the King hence to-day ? 
Macbeth. — He does ; he did appoint so." 

And to Lennox's description of the night, he an- 
swers : " 'Twas a rough night. " An examination of 
the play will show that he maintains this manner of 
speech throughout. 

It is worth while to note, how in the excitement 
of preparation for his last battle, the tone of Macbeth 
changes as he addresses one or another of the inter- 
locutors. He contemptuously damns the "cream- 
faced loon " who shows fear, and flings a wrathful 
" Liar and slave " at the messenger who brings the 
bad news of Birnam Wood ; to his last friend, his 
armor-bearer, Seyton, he pours out his heart in sym- 
pathetic and confidential frankness; and, in the next 
moment, engages the doctor, the man of learning, in 
an ironical, yet highly imaginative conversation. 

His exalted imagination, his vaulting ambition and 
his nearness to the throne had lured his thoughts to 
forbidden fields. Haunted by the glories of the 
royal state, he saw within the circle of the diadem 
power and fame, and (such is human weakness) 
some vision of compensatory beneficence. And this 
view is countenanced by the Chronicle, which de- 
scribes him as a just, vigorous and religious monarch. 
All this was embraced in his scheme of 

" Solely sovereign sway and masterdom," 

in the way of which only the feeble Duncan stood ; 
Though Macbeth declares the first " supernatural 
soliciting " of the Weird Sisters, a 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 63 

"Suggestion 
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair 
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, 
Against the use of nature.'" 
yet we find him presently contemplating himself as 
mounting the throne, 

'♦ If chance will have me king, why chance may 
Crown me, without my stir."' 

A friend's mischance is to be the airy stepping 
stone from thought to deed. Macbeth nurses these 
'black and deep desires." When he meets his wife 
after all his achievements, his first words are 
' ' My dearest love, 
Duncan comes here to-night ; " 

and hers, 

"And when goes hence? " 

to which he significantly replies, 

" To-morrow — as he purposes." 

It is she who shapes the horrid thought in its com- 
pleteness, 

" O never 

" Shall sun that morrow see." 
There is a tremendous force of purpose in this short, 
strong phrase. Each word stands out like a boss 
upon an iron mace. Across this sombre hatching of 
conspiracy, the arrival of the saintly Duncan falls 
like a burst of sunshine. He pauses a moment 
before the castle gates in calm enjoyment of the fair 
aspect of the peaceful scenery. He says to Banquo : 
"This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air 

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 

Unto our gentle senses." 
Banquo, with the same human eye, takes note of 



64 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 

"This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet," 

and briefly draws a picture of tranquil beauty. What 
an outlook of nature smiles upon us. Then, like the 
last rays of the setting sun, Duncan's innocence 
casts its beams upon the portals of that grim abode 
of conspiracy and sudden death. With absolute 
trust and courtly grace he enters the castle. The 
confiding gentleness with which he commits himself 
to the hands of his assassins is very touching. 

But once within the sepulchral jaws of this trea- 
sonable den, and all is changed. Murder lurks in the 
murky air. No supernatural machinery is needed to 
show that here the fiends have mastery. The im- 
pulse has been given, and man's wickedness works 
out the plot. In a gray and vaulted hall, dimly we 
discern two figures whispering in shadow, and an 
air-drawn dagger, — "on its blade and dudgeon gouts 
of blood which were not so before " — and then, 

" Methought I heard a voice cry, ' sleep no more, ' 
Macbeth does murder sleep." 

Duncan lies murdered in his bed. Macbeth had 
made his choice, and henceforth to him, 
" Fair is foul, and foul is fair." 

But he had not done "the deep damnation of his 
taking off" on kinsman and king, without hesitation 
and debate. The progress and growth of evil is 
powerfully illustrated in the reaction of guilt by 
which Macbeth and his wife mutually urge each 
other onward and downward. He first touched the 
fatal spring of her ambition, and instantly her. whole 
nature glowed with the cold intensity of the electric 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 65 

light. Then, when he seemed to vacillate before the 
threats of vanquished virtue and an awakened con- 
science, the spirit he has raised in the woman's bosom 
will not down, but lifts its serpent crest to taunt with 
hissing tongue, and lure and urge him relentlessly to 
the bloody deed. Her hard, cold, narrow and direct 
intellect sees no end but the diadem, no means but 
the dagger. Her unbending, yet feminine, wicked- 
ness employs every stratagem of diabolical rhetoric 
to hold him to his purpose ; she knows him to be 
fearless, aggressive, audacious, and, with a purpose 
once fully formed, prompt and decisive. This was 
the temper which had made him so dauntless a sol- 
dier on the field, and so fortunate a commatider. To 
fix that purpose in the contest between conscience 
and will, she combines a tremendous energy with 
fiendish subtlety. When he seems about to cast aside 
his dark design, she holds him to it by first suggest- 
ing it to him as her work, not his. 

"He that's coming 
Must be provided for ; and you shall put 
This night's great business into my dispatch." 

She knows him well ; for, once resolved, he truly 

says : 

"I am settled, and bend up 
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat." 

And so he is led on and on down the dark and 
winding stairway of death and hell. 

While the poet's function in Macbeth was, as I 
have said, the evolution of a moral problem, and not 
specially the delineation of character, yet Shake- 

5 



66 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

speare's absolute artistic perceptions would not per- 
mit him to portray a character inconsistent with 
itself. Did time permit, I could readily demonstrate 
this in each person of the drama. It is Shake- 
speare's special gift to condense a whole character 
and display it in a few words, as a flash of light- 
ning-, in blackest midnight, reveals a landscape. 

Thus, while in Holinshed's Chronicle Banquo is 
Macbeth 's accomplice, the poet, ennobling his char- 
acter and idealizing his integrity, makes him serve a 
higher purpose. And so we find Banquo described 
by Macbeth, who says of him, 

•'There's none but he 
Whose being I do fear." 

And again, 

Our fears in Banquo 
Stick deep ; and in his royalty of nature 
Reigns that which would be feared :— 'tis much he dares, — 
And to that dauntless temper of his mind, 
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor 
To act in safety." 

Macduff, "noble, wise, judicious," "child of in- 
tegrity," and full of "noble passion," yet is ever 
hasty and rash. The gracious and gentle Duncan 
suffers for his childlike trustfulness, while his son, 
the wary Malcolm, exhibits in every word and act 
the caution and worldly wisdom in which his father 
is deficient. His prudential virtues receive their pro- 
per temporal reward, while Duncan, sacrificed on the 
altar of his own credulity, wears the crown of martyr- 
dom. Even in the subordinate characters of the 
play, we find this coherence, as in the queen's gen- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 67 

tlewoman, who, in her reticence and propriety, is 
still ever a gentlewoman indeed. 

But to my mind the nicest analysis and most care- 
ful synthesis could not so truly construct a wicked 
woman, as Shakespeare has created one in Lady 
Macbeth. The whole gamut of criticism has been 
run by the commentators in characterizing her. 
From the verdict of those, who, with the bereaved 
Malcolm, describe her as "the fiendlike queen," we 
may pass to the opposite view of the German critic, 
Leo. This profound pundit says of her, "the wife, 
on the other hand, at the side of a noble, honorable 
husband, always faithful to the right, would have 
been a pure and innocent woman diffusing happiness 
around her domestic circle, in spite of some asperi- 
ties in her temper." Even this genial estimate can- 
not so far remove prejudice as to enable us to 
imagine Lady Macbeth as a pleasant person to have 
about the house. She is a typical murderess : yet 
she is a woman, not a fiend ; a woman, and a 
queen. 

We have seen her finishing the work of over- 
throwing Macbeth's conscience, which the Weird 
Sisters had begun. She says of Duncan, 

«' I could have stabbed him as he slept." 
Yet she did not. There is a vast distance between 
intensity of desire and power of execution. Her 
feminine nature recoiled from the deed itself, though 
not from its contriving. Unlike Macbeth, she had 
seen no daggers, heard no voices ; but she could 
not actually stab the sleeping Duncan. She excuses 
herself thus, 



68 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

' ' Had he not resembled 
My father as he slept, I had done't." 

Mrs. Siddons, the dark-browed queen of tragedy, 
fancied that Lady Macbeth was "fair, feminine, nay 
perhaps even fragile," vauUing ambition kindling 
" all the splendors of her dark, blue eyes." But crime 
has no special complexion — blonde or brunette — no 
more than has female fascination. 

She is guilty, but a queen, and retains, even under 
the shadow of her inexpiable sin, the lofty refine- 
ment of her birth and rank. In the horror and con- 
fusion of Duncan's death, she swoons. This is the 
turning point in her fate. Then the bubble of am- 
bition burst. How hollow and delusive it all seems 
now. 

" Nought's had, all's spent, 
Where our desire is got without content ; 
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy 
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy." 

At first, clinging to the last plank of human sym- 
pathy and love left from the wreck, she bends herself 
to the task of consoling her husband — but in vain. 
For herself, nothing is left but remorse. The stiff 
fibre of her pitiless heart had stretched too far — and 
broken ; but not in repentance, only in the agony of 
a never-dying dread. The hand that a little water 
was to cleanse bears "a damned spot." She 

" Is troubled with thick coming fancies 
That keep her from her rest." 

Walking in her troubled sleep, she cries : 

"What ! will these hands ne'er be clean ? 
Here's the smell of blood still ; all 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 69 

The perfumes of Arabia will not 
Sweeten this little hand. O ! O ! O !" 

Well may the doctor exclaim : 

"What a sigh is there ! the heart is sorely charged." 

Well might she wish herself with pious Duncan in 
his peace. At last there came a cry of women, and 
the Queen was dead. 

At the point of Duncan's doom, Macbeth trembled, 
and his wife chided him as "infirm of purpose." 
But his man's nature was made of the sterner stuff. 
As he stepped from crime to crime, what with the 
swing of his sceptre and his angry work of repres- 
sion, he became "bloody, bold and resolute." Baf- 
fled by juggling friends, betrayed by courtiers, and 
bereft of wife, his heart did not break, nor his brain 
become frenzied. He opposed himself, like a Titan, 
to the vengeance of heaven and the dread of hell — 
fear of man he never knew. The props of infernal 
prophecy sank under him, and yet he would not 
fly. Then, " championed to the utterance with fate," 
at the last he falls like a soldier, sword in hand, 
unrepenting and defiant. 

The poetic justice which assigns awakened sensi- 
bility as a necessary part of the penalty of, sin is 
incorrect. Macbeth displays a more usual form of 
punishment. A gradual hardening of the heart, a 
constant moral descent with neither ability nor wish 
to recall the lost innocence and an increasing cata- 
logue of crimes ensue, until the whip of scorpions 
and the avenging Furies are needed to shake his ob- 
durate soul. In him we learn that there is no dis- 
connected sin, but that offences are the links in an 



/.. 



70 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 



endless chain, harnessing cause to remotest conse- 
quence, and dragging the guilt-burthened soul down- 
ward forever. We saw him at first, with "love, 
honor, obedience, troops of friends." And now, in 

their stead, 

"Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath, 
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not." 

It is thus that Satan fulfills his promises. Even 
in the moment of fruition, when success seemed to 
have justified his usurpation, he received a bitter 
foretaste of his awful future. Shakespeare does not 
palter with this aspect of crime. He fills the meed 
of temporal prosperity for the murderer, crowns 
him, surrounds his throne with obsequious courtiers, 
crushes his enemies, and gives him all — 

" Thou hast it now : King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, 
As the weird women promised.' ' 

But he does not give him one happy moment. 
Lady Macbeth says to him : 

" How now, my lord ! why do you keep alone, 
Of sorriest fancies your companions making ?" 

He bewails that they must 

«' Sleep 
In the affliction of the terrible dreams 
That shake us nightly ; better be with the dead, 
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace." 

The moral isolation of Macbeth and his wife is 
marked from the moment of his crime. The fissure 
gradually widens until it becomes an abyss of dis- 
trust, hatred and revolt The thanes fall away, the 
soldiers blench, 

"And none serve with him but constrained things, 
Whose hearts are absent too." 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 71 

This moral isolation — this segregation from human 
sympathy — ends in the alienation of the guilty pair; 
and their mutual affection, once so tender, closes in 
cold disregard. Selfishness is the essence of sin, and 
in absolute selfishness it finds its consummation, 

Macbeth is a tragedy indeed. It is the spectacle 
of a human soul, which, under no depostism of des- 
tiny, but in the exercise of a lawless will, accepts the 
bribe of the tempter, and thus makes a destiny for 
itself — the destiny, of perdition. We see a man of 
might, with his feet planted on a rock. To win a 
gilded bauble he plunges into the sea. He is a strong 
swimmer in the arms of the whirlpool ; but they are 
arms which will not give up their prey. The lesson 
of Macbeth is a sad and solemn one. It bids us look 
into the abysses of our own souls, lest therein may 
lurk some motive to tempt us to our doom. And it 
teaches this lesson by exhibiting a human soul — a. 
grand heroic soul — tempted, struggling, betrayed, 
lost. 

In the words of the Preacher, the son of David, 
King in Jerusalem : "Let us hear the conclusion of 
the whole matter : fear God, and keep His command- 
ments : for this is the whole duty of man. For God 
shall bring every work into judgment, with every 
secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be 
evil." 



72 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HAMLET. 

♦'You would pluck out the heart of my mystery." 

Ilamlet, II., 2. 

The republic of letters has its first, or central, 
place — its throne. Even if merely a primacy among 
peers, the suffrages of the world, howsoever irregu- 
larly ascertained, insist upon a First to fill it. 
Homer long enjoyed this distinction, and his Satur- 
nian reign has its partisans ; but English-speaking 
men will not have it so, and a new sovereign now 
sways the Olympus of thought and imagination — 
one Shakespeare — with the divinity that doth hedge 
a king. There are rebels who held out against this 
usurpation, but in vain. Dion Boucicault shows 
most ingeniously how much has been done for 
Shakespeare's reputation by play-actors, the "stars" 
of the stage. It may be so, but these stage triumphs 
are but one small fraction of his mighty influence on 
modern thought ; one facet, among many, of the 
diamond that reflects back to the questions of 
philosophy, poesy and prudential common-sense, 
answers that are accepted as oracles, Delphic and 
divine. 

The Baconian contention, rooted not in reasonable 
protest but in mere love of paradox, is really a com- 
pliment to Shakespeare. It presupposes that what 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



11 



he did was impossible to any but a genius of the 
highest order, with the best training, and with all 
the advantages of wealth, leisure and opportunity. 
And yet who was Homer? A blind nobody; 
though Wolf and the Wolfians, anticipating modern 
industry, would have him transformed into a poetical 
syndicate or Pan Hellenic Ballad Trust Company. 
The plays of Shakespeare, argue the Baconians, are 
too great to have been written by a mere play-writer ; 
a philosopher must have done them ; no less a one, 
indeed, than the mighty Bacon, powerful, subtle, 
aphoristic, could have produced such dramas. This 
Baconian- myth logic might make William M. Evarts 
the creator of Lord Dundreary, and Gladstone the 
only possible author of the Idyls of the King. The 
fundamental mistake in all this consists : first, in as- 
signing all training to the schools; second, in deciding 
a priori where, on whom, and how, will descend the 
divine gift of genius. Shakespeare, however, did 
have just the training to fit him for this work, and 
Bacon did not ; but, more than all, the same Provi- 
dence who bestowed on Bacon acumen and breadth 
of view gave Shakespeare insight. The whole con- 
troversy implies, argues from, the fact of a master 
— a mighty thinker — as the author of these plays. 
Bacon's analysis went through the world of thought, 
clearing and classifying things with the sword of the 
spirit. He saw with clear perception their true rela- 
tions, and the law which expressed their order. But 
his talents were other than those of the poor player 
who possessed the magic art of literary creation, who 
had received the gift of vision and of prophecy and 



74 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

tongues, and who could summon from the world of 
idea existences that have put on the garb of humanity 
and become immortal. Think of it, indeed ; are not 
the persons of his drama more real, more distinct, 
than the personages who then strutted as the great, 
and believed that they were moving and moulding 
the world, but who are now to us mere faded 
phantoms, shadows in the lamentable past, extin- 
guished candles, burnt to the socket, with some faint 
odor left of smoke and grease ? But it is not to our 
purpose here to enter upon the great Baconian con- 
troversy, and we dismiss it until we have the final 
verdict of a court of last resort. We will assume 
William Shakespeare. Credo ! 

William Shakespeare, playwright, stage manager, 
prudent man of business, who didst bequeath thy 
second best bed, for reasons explicable in sentiment, 
to thy relict, whilom fair Anne Hathaway, stand 
forth and justify this thy preposterous claim to the 
primacy in the republic of letters! "Fair sirs, I 
make no claim. In my day, for bread and better- 
ment, I wrought, doing what my hand found to do. 
I printed few books. True, I made plays, and 
gathered shells and seaweeds along the shore, where- 
with the sons of men might beguile some idle hours 
— in thinking. And yet — and yet — it did sometimes 
seem to me that in me I had that which might have 
fathered all of poetry and all of philosophy. But the 
ocean was too vast, and thought — O, thought ! — too 
wide, and so — " 

But not thus, gentle spirit, can thy claim — or 
claim for thee — be set aside. Serenely mayest thou 



% 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. ^^ 

smile at all the angry war of words between the 
champions who would canonize and the contestants 
who would crucify thy personality. But thy cause 
is in safe charge ; and even as Aaron and Hur 
stayed the hands of Moses, so shall Goethe and 
Coleridge uphold thine. 

The inspiration which Goethe received from 
Shakespeare is thus described by him ; speaking as 
Wilhelm Meister, he says : 

" Yes ! I cannot recollect that any book, any man, 
any incident of my life, has produced such import- 
ant effects on me as the precious works to which by 
your kindness I have been directed. They seem as 
if they were performances of some celestial genius, 
descending among men, to make them, by the mild- 
est instructions, acquainted with themselves. They 
are no fictions. You would think, while reading 
them, you stood before the unclosed awful books of 
Fate, while the whirlwind of the most impassioned 
life was howling through the leaves and tossing 
them fiercely to and fro. The strength and tender- 
ness, the power and peacefulness of this man have 
so astonished and transported me, that I long vehe- 
mently for the time when I shall have it in my 
power to read farther. 

"All the anticipations I have ever had regarding 
man and his destiny, which have accompanied me 
from youth upwards, often unobserved by myself, I 
find developed and fulfilled in Shakespeare's writ- 
ings. It seems as if he cleared up every one of our 
enigmas for us, though we cannot say : ' Here or 
there is a word of solution.' His men appear like 



f 



76 TJIE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

natural men, and yet they are not. These, the most 
mysterious and complex productions of creation, 
here act before us as if they were watches whose 
dial plates and cases were of crystal, which pointed 
out, according to their use, the course of the hours 
and minutes, while, at the same time, you could dis- 
cern the combination of wheels and springs that 
turned them. The few glances I have cast over 
Shakespeare's world incite me, more than anything 
beside, to quicken my footsteps forward into the 
actual world, to mingle in the flood of destinies that 
is suspended over it, and at length, if I shall prosper, 
to draw a few cups from the great ocean of true 
nature, and to distribute them from off the stage 
among the tnirsting people of my native land. " Under 
which wonderfully mixed metaphor, the great Ger- 
man advanced an idea. 

Coleridge writes thus: "I believe Shakespeare 
was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than 
he is now to an educated man, except for a few 
local allusions of no consequence. And I said he is 
of no age — nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, 
or profession. The body and substance of his 
works came out of the unfathomable depths of his 
own oceanic mind ; his observation and reading, 
which were considerable, supplied him with the 
drapery of his figures. " (Table Talk, vol. 6, p. 506.) 

Great as was the genius of Shakespeare, his judg- 
ment was at least equal to it. 

The sweeping nature of Coleridge's characteriza- 
tion of Shakespeare as the exponent of a world 
literature has been questioned on the broad ground 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 77 

that no such literature and no such character can or 
does exist, but that every writer and thinker being- 
limited and conditioned by his age and country, by 
antecedent conditions and actual environment, can 
only reflect or embody a segment of a national and 
epochal literature. Of course we can all see that 
the arc of one man's genius does not, and cannot, 
include or encompass the entire circumference of 
humanity, but Shakespeare's point of observation 
seems nearer the centre than any other man's since 
St. Paul. We must not be too literal with Goethe and 
Coleridge, and men who use the vernacular, instead 
of scientific formulas. The truth is often larger than 
the fact, though it must contain it. The plane on 
which move such minds as Tennyson's, Spencer's 
and Gladstone's, and that on which crawls the glow- 
worm that serves the Australian savage, or the slum 
dweller of New York, for light of intellect, seem 
parallel, one in the empyrean, the other in the slime, 
but with no point of approach. And yet Shake- 
speare did conceive, create, Hamlet and Christopher 
Sly, Prospero and Caliban, Falstaff and Othello, and 
had learned the secret of intellectual reconciliation 
between phases of humanity the most diverse. So 
that, though it is true that in the " Roman citizens " of 
Coriolanus or Julius Cassar w^e discover the London 
Mob, and no Romans ever had the opinions, or 
exact modes of thought, that Shakespeare portrays in 
them, still neither shall this concern us, for they had 
hearts and passions which bellowed forth rage or 
applause, in different idiom truly, but with the same 
pulsations that now stir all hearts. Surely it is not 



78 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

too much to call him the "many-minded." If not 
absolute, universal, as nothing human, finite, can be, 
yet, as touching profounder depths, revealing in 
clearest light deeper abysses, and embracing wider 
relations than any other, must we not fairly assign 
to Shakespeare a quasi universality, and such actual 
primacy, and even sovereignty, in the world of 
letters, as is gained by common consent and general 
suffrage ? 

If the first place in literature be assigned to Shake- 
speare, so, though not without dissent, the first place 
among his creations must be accorded to Hamlet. 
Admit that Macbeth is a grander poem, that in dra- 
matic conception and execution Othello excels it, 
that Lear stirs blacker depths in the Stygian pool, 
that in the music of its cadences the Tempest beats 
with a finer rhythm,. that in a dozen of his dramas he 
holds the mirror more squarely to the exterior 
realities of life around us, and that in Hamlet a 
hundred faults may be found, yet, after all, we say 
this is marvellous, this is the masterpiece of the 
master. 

Strange that this should be so, as this play is, in 
form and conception, the least dramatic of Shake- 
speare's great plays. Many of its situations, it is true, 
are sufficiently striking to warrant its popularity with 
the groundlings as well as with the scholars and 
critics ; but a bare comparison will show how 
inferior as an acting play it is in tragic movement to 
Macbeth, Richard III., and other tragedies, and 
notably to Othello, which that able and admirable 
critic and scholar, Professor Thomas R. Price of 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 79 

Columbia college, has demonstrated, I may say, to 
be Shakespeare's best acting play. 

Why Hamlet should be regarded as the paragon of 
plays is, indeed, perplexing, if we look merely to its 
defects and limitations. The plot, at bottom, is 
barbarous, inconsequent, incoherent ; the action 
drags ; the crisis is an anti-climax ; the catastrophe 
not a consequence of the action, but of the want of 
'action, "for this effect defective comes by cause," 
as pedantic Polonius says. And occult questions of 
life, death, immortality, free-will and fate propounded 
receive no reply, except the cruel answer of the 
Sphinx to those who failed to solve her riddles, the 
bloody enigma of the catastrophe — destruction. 
What, then, does it all mean? Why do we turn 
again and again to the melancholy Dane with such 
intense and sympathetic interest.? Why ask with 
him the questions he has left unanswered .-' Because, 
in Hamlet the poet has bared a human heart. We 
look into its magic mirror and see our own hearts 
there. 

While it is evident that Goethe, in the confidence 
of his own genius, felt able to improve on Shake- 
speare, and make a version of Hamlet better fitted to 
the wants of the stage at least, and while it is still 
more evident that in this estimate of his own powers 
he was mistaken, yet we must not forget the fact 
that to him more than to any one else is due a true 
method of interpretation of the master. With his 
powerful intellect, vivid imagination, and robust 
ethical sense, concentrated upon a kindred genius, 
even though higher and broader than his own, he 



8o THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

was able, almost intuitively, to arrive at truths, which 
later, more learned and analytic, criticism has not 
been able to shake. We owe it to him that he 
arrested the thought of his century and compelled it 
to regard the great works of Shakespeare, not with a 
mousing and mechanical mental anatomy, but 
broadly, in the entirety of their conception, and 
from a spiritual point of view. If the following 
characterization of Hamlet be incomplete, erroneous 
indeed in part, as I think it is, yet in the extracts 
which follow, expository of the play, this first truly 
great commentator has been unsurpassed by his 
successors. He says : 

"Soft, and from a noble stem, this royal flower 
had sprung up under the immediate influences of 
majesty ; the idea of moral rectitude with that of 
princely elevation, that feeling of the good and 
dignified with the consciousness of high birth, had 
in him been unfolded simultaneously. He was a 
prince, by birth a prince ; and he wished to reign, 
only that good men might be good without obstruc- 
tion. Pleasing in form, polished by nature, cour- 
teous from the heart, he was meant to be the patron 
of youth and the joy of the world. 

" He was calm in his temper, artless in his con- 
duct, neither pleased with idleness nor too violently 
eager for employment. The routine of an university 
he seemed to continue at court. He possessed more 
mirth of humor than .of heart ; he was a good com- 
panion, pliant, courteous, discreet, and able to forget 
and forgive an injury, yet never able to unite himself 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 8 1 

with those who overstepped the limits of the right, 
the good, and the becoming." 

"Calm" is certainly not the term to use of this 
restless intellect and eager heart ; nor "artless,'' of a 
genius born for intrigue and full of all resources, 
except the direct way. In all the rest, the Interpreter 
seems to have read aright this wonderful character, 
but the subtlety of the prince has escaped, or be- 
guiled, the search of the poet. 

Goethe continues: "Figure to yourselves this 
youth, this son of princes ; conceive him vividly ; 
bring his state before your eyes, and then observe 
when he learns that his father's spirit walks ; stand 
by him in the terrors of the night, even when the 
venerable ghost appears before him. He is seized 
with boundless horror ; he speaks to the mysterious 
form ; he sees it beckon him ; he follows and hears. 
The fearful accusation of his uncle rings in his 
ears the summons to revenge, and the piercing, oft- 
repeated prayer, ' Remember me ! ' 

"And, when the ghost has vanished, who is it 

that stands before us ? A young hero panting for 

vengeance ? A prince by birth rejoicing to be called 

to punish the usurper of his crown } No ! trouble 

and astonishment take hold of the solitary young 

man ; he grows bitter against smiling villains, swears 

that he will not forget the spirit, and concludes with 

the significant ejaculation : 

" • The time is out of joint ; O, cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! * 

"In these words, I imagine, will be found the key 
to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that 



82 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent 
the effect of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for 
the performance of it. In this view the whole play- 
seems to me to be composed. There is an oak tree 
planted in a costly jar which should have borne only 
pleasant flowers in its bosom ; the roots expand, the 
jar is shivered. 

"A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, 
without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, 
sinks beneath a burden it cannot bear and must not 
cast away. All duties are holy for him ; the present 
is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of 
him, not in themselves impossibilities, but such for 
him. He winds and turns, and torments himself; 
he advances and recoils ; is ever put in mind, ever 
puts himself in mind ; at last does all but lose his 
purpose from his thoughts, yet still without recover- 
ing his peace of mind. 

" It pleases us, it flatters us, to see a hero acting 
on his own strength, loving and hating at the bidding 
of his heart, undertaking and completing, casting 
every obstacle aside, and attaining some great end. 
Poets and historians would willingly persuade us 
that so good a lot may fall to man. In Hamlet we 
are taught another lesson ; the hero is without a 
plan, but the play is full of plan. Here we have no 
villain punished on some self-conceived and rigidly 
accomplished scheme of vengeance ; a horrid deed is 
done ; it rolls along with all its consequences, drag- 
ging with it even the guiltless ; the guilty perpetrator 
would, as it seems, evade the abyss made ready for 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 83 

him ; yet he plunges in, and at the very point where 
he thinks he will escape and happily complete his 
course. 

" For it is the property of crime to extend its mis- 
chief over innocence, as it is of virtue to extend its 
blessings over many that deserve them not ; while 
frequently the author of the one or of the other is not 
punished or rewarded at all. Here is this play of 
ours, how strange ! The pit of darkness sends its 
spirit and demands revenge, in vain ! All circum- 
stances tend one way and hurry to revenge, in vain ! 
Neither earthly nor infernal thing may bring about 
what is reserved for fate alone ; the hour of judgment 
comes ; the wicked falls with the good ; one race is 
moved away that another may spring up." 

While such is Goethe's view, since reflected and 
refracted in half a hundred German mirrors, Karl 
Werder*, in a very ingenious and able argument, 
has adopted a theory directly contrary to it. Ac- 
cording to this theory, Hamlet's will was not at 
fault, but the situation made it morally impossible 
for him to obtain a proper vengeance by killing the 
King. He was more or less convinced of Claudius's 
guilt, but he had no evidence except the revelation 
of the Ghost, who could not be produced to prove 
his own assassination and the innocence of Hamlet, 
brought to trial as a parricide and regicide. The 
crime was improbable ; the proof of it impossible. 
Werder argues that his object was not to kill Clau- 
dius but to force him to confess, or display, his guilt, 
and that he pursued this purpose constantly, and by 
the best means possible. Moreover, he insists that 

* Furness' Variorum Hamlet, II., 354. 



84 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

the drama moves rapidly to this conclusion. He 
fixes as the turning point in the play Hamlet's mis- 
take in swerving from his purpose when he kills 
Polonius, after which event he is powerless. But 
the King, as the second person in the piece, then 
takes upon himself the solution of the knot, by 
action, and thus brings ruin upon his own head ; so 
that, at last, guilt works out its own retribution, and 
secret crime comes to light. All this, and much 
more, is carefully argued with much subtlety of rea- 
soning, but after all with more speciousness than 
solidity. It is the elaboration of paradox. How 
does common-sense view it.? Shakespeare and his 
audience realize that a great crime has been com- 
mitted, and that " Hamlet, Revenge ! " is the burden 
of the theme. Much that Werder says is true, 
though not altogether new. Claudius was not a 
usurper in any proper sense, but held a legal title as 
King Consort, and his slaughter, without more ado, 
was not, dramatically-speaking, possible. But, if 
Hamlet's purpose was to make manifest his guilt, 
which we may for argument's sake admit, surely the 
worst way possible was to attempt to entrap him 
into a confession. And, moreover, there is little in 
the language of the interlocutors to favor such a 
theory, for the play of Gonzago is too thin a device 
to rest a hypothesis upon ; while Hamlet's contin- 
uous whetting of his purpose to kill the King, and 
the ghost's supernatural invocation to the deed in 
the 4th act show that the poet's conception of Ham- 
let's mission was the punishment of the murderer. 
For instance, Hamlet says, "I say, we will have no 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 85 

more marriages : those that are married already, all 
hut one, shall live : the rest shall keep as they are. " 

Mr. W. W. Story, a very competent and pleasant 
critic, pointing out the weakness of German criticism 
on Shakespeare, says : " Even Goethe's 'Analysis of 
Hamlet,' much as it has been praised, seems very 
poor to me — not to be mentioned for insight and 
sympathetic sense ^N\W\, forinstance. Lamb, Coleridge, 
or Hazlitt." While this is true, it must be remem- 
bered that they had the benefit of Goethe's interpreta- 
tion before them, and the powerful aid of a common 
mother tongue and the same national instincts to 
guide them in comprehending the author. 

And though the Analysis is full of obvious errors 
and incoherences, a step in the dark toward truth, it 
does not deserve Story's censure, that it is " boring 
and mechanical," for it struck the true keynote for 
all the rest. But it is true that one very signal defect 
in German criticism of Shakespeare is the want of per- 
spective. Story says truly, " The Germans have the 
vice of anatorflizing Shakespeare, and laying him out 
into parts and pieces, and admiring the worst as much 
as the best. They find admirable reasons to show 
that the notoriously ungenuine parts of his plays are 
as admirable as the others. When they once go in to 
praise, they praise everything." 

Hear, however, what Coleridge says : " I believe 
the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's 
deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. 
Indeed, that this character must have some connec- 
tion with the common fundamental laws of our 
nature may be assumed froni the fact that Hamlet 



86 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

has been the darling of every country in which the 
literature of England has been fostered. In order to 
understand him, it is essential that we should reflect 
on the constitution of our own minds. Man is dis- 
tinguished from the brute animals in proportion as 
thought prevails over sense ; but in the healthy pro- 
cesses of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained 
between the impressions from outward objects and 
the inward operations of the intellect : — for if there 
be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man 
thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, 
and loses his natural power of action. Now, one of 
Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to con- 
ceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid 
excess, and then to place himself, Shakespeare, thus 
mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. 
In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the 
moral necessity of a due balance between our atten- 
tion to the objects of our sense, and our meditation 
on the workings of our minds, — an equilibrium be- 
tween the real and the imaginary worlcfs. In Ham- 
let this balance is disturbed : his thoughts, and the 
images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his 
actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly 
passing through the medium of his contemplations, 
acquire, as they pass, a form and a color not naturally 
their own. Hence weseeagreat, an almost enormous, 
intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion 
to real action, consequent upon it, with all its symp- 
toms and accompanying qualities. This character 
Shakspeare placed in circunastances, under which it 
is obliged to act on the spur of the moment : — Ham- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN- PROBLEMS, 87 

let is brave and careless of death ; but he vacillates 
from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and 
loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. 
Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct con- 
trast to that of Macbeth ; the one proceeds with the 
utmost slowness, the other with crowded and breath- 
less rapidity.* 

" Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the 
abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. 
He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportun- 
ity ; but every incident sets him thinking ; and it is 
curious, and, at the same time, strictly natural, that 
Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should 
be impelled, at "last, by mere accident, to effect his 
object I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may 
say so." {Table Talk Vol. 6., p. 285.) 

Lowell carries forward and develops these ideas of 
Goethe and Coleridge when he says, " Hamlet knows 
only too well what 'twere good to do, but he palters 
with everything in a double sense : he sees the grain 
of good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in 
good, as they exist in the world, and, finding that he 
can make those feather-weighted accidents balance 
each other, infers that there is little to choose between 
the essences themselves. He is of Montaigne's mind, 
and says expressly that ' there is nothing good or ill,' 
but thinking makes it so.' He dwells so exclusively 
in the world of ideas that the world of facts seems 
trifling, nothing is worth the while ; and he has been 

* Notes on Hamlet, Complete works, Coleridge, vol. IV., p, 144. 
(Harper Bros., 1858.) ^ ^ 



88 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

SO long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual 
life is concerned, that, when at last an object and an 
aim are forced upon him, he cannot deal with them, 
and gropes about vainly for a motive outside of him- 
self that shall marshall his thoughts for him and 
guide his faculties into the path of action. He is the 
victim not so much of feebleness of will as of an 
intellectual indifference that hinders the will from 
working long in any one direction. He wishes to 
will, but never wills. His continual iteration of re- 
solve shows that he has no resolution." {Lowell's 
Among my Books, p. 214.) 

"If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would 
seem to be, that -Will is Fate, and that, Will once 
abdicating, the inevitable successor in the regency is 
Chance. Had Hamlet acted, instead of musing how 
good it would be to act, the king might have been 
the only victim. As it is, all the main actors in the 
story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his irresolution. 
We see how a single great vice of character at last 
draws to itself as allies and confederates all other 
weaknesses of the man, as in civil wars the timid 
and the selfish wait to throw themselves upon the 
stronger side." {Lowell's Among my Books, ^.221^). 

Why is the play of Hamlet what it is, and not 
something else .-' This has long been a question for 
the critics. The fundamental idea, the. principle that 
directed the action and produced the situations of 
the play, has been eagerly sought by scores of com- 
mentators, who have hinged it upon this or upon 
that theory of Hamlet's character or condition, 
whence all the rest is logically derived. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 89 

To collate or review the manifold methods of 
interpretation of this tragedy adopted by commenta- 
tors, except in a summary way, is not to my present 
purpose. One will have us believe that Shakespeare 
is striving- to reproduce realistically a picture of that 
rude Viking life referred to in the legend of Saxo 
Grammaticus, on which the play is founded; and 
this, though the historic sense and historic perspec- 
tive are modern, even recent, and Shakespeare, who 
was a psychologist, not a scientist, wore his array 
of facts as loosely as Hamlet his sable mantle. 
Among the Germans, and, for that matter, among 
certain Americans also, it is not uncommon to repre- 
sent Shakespeare as anticipating with prophetic ken 
some later development of metaphysics or philoso- 
phy, and illustrating it in his dramas. Now he is a 
Neo-Hegelian in the third stage of consciousness, 
and, interpreting him according to the formulas, we 
are called upon to read through the thin veil of 
word-play and plot the final facts of Being prefigured 
in his types : — and, if they are not there, so much 
the worse for Shakespeare. Or, again, an ingenious 
Max-Mullerite, or G. W. Coxologist, discovers that 
Hamlet is the unravelling of some Norse saga, the 
hatching of a myth Q'g'g laid in the Dawn of History, 
in the primeval past. Carl Karpf offers us this exqui- 
site gem of criticism : Hamlet's father, "Orvandell, 
(the Frozen Toe), the chilblain, is as the lightning 
spark, the hypostasis of Thor." 

Furness, in his invaluable Variorum edition, gives 
us a complete mine of these dissentient opinions ; 
some grave and well considered, many most whim- 



90 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

sical and fantastic* Roetschl (II. p. 294) tells us, that 
"in Hamlet, Shakespeare has, like a prophet, seized 
the nature of the German character in its deepest 
significance. Hamlet's strength and weakness are 
the strength and weakness of the German people." 
Freiligrath, begins a poem, beautifully translated by 
Mrs. Wistar (p. 379) : "Yes, Germany is Hamlet!" 
Sievers (p. 223) says : "We ourselves trust in the 
sequel to prove that this drama is intended to repje- 
sent the pecuHar, fundamental principle of Prot- 
estantism." He says also: "What the poet here 
represents is the torture and weakness of a nature 
that has fallen out with the world, and lost its hold : 
it is the break of the consciousness which robs the 
soul of faith, and renders it incapable of all self-for- 
getting devotion, of all elevation above self. The 
great Protestant idea of man's need of faith, of faith 
as the condition of his peace, and the fulfilment of 
his mission as a moral being, this it is to which this 
profoundest and most moving of all the works of 
Shakespeare's genius owes its origin." While such 
a conclusion may possibly be implicit somewhere in 
the teachings of this drama, it assuredly requires a 
most strained interpretation to set it out as the origi- 
nal purpose or as the fundamental principle, which 
Shakespeare intended to represent in it. Rohrbach 
(p. 306) says, "That Shakespeare meant to portray 
in Hamlet a sickly talking hero." Again, we have 
found Werder picturing him as a man ever ready to 
strike, to cut the Gordian knot. He tells us, "The 

* Quotations not otherwise marked are from Furness' Hamlet, 2d 
vol. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



91 



piece knows no delay." One man, Dr. Benedix, 
(p. 351) regards the whole play as a bungling mis- 
take. And Moriz Rapp (p. 295) comes to the con- 
clusion, "that the scheme of the work was from the 
beginning wrongly contrived, i.e., undramatically. " 
Play-goers and thinkers have thought otherwise. 

Voltaire says of Hamlet, that " it is a vulgar and bar- 
barous drama that would not be tolerated by the vilest 
populace of France or Italy." " One would imagine 
this piece to be the work of a drunken savage." 

Froude points out very well the ineptitude and 
incongruity of much of the criticism and alteration 
of Shakespeare in the following passage : 

" Gibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter 
Shakespeare. The French king, in Lear, was to be 
got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and Lear 
himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a 
golden old age. They could not bear that Hamlet 
should suffer for the sins of Claudius. The wicked 
king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet 
and Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live 
happily ever after. A common novelist would have 
arranged it thus ; and you would have had your com- 
fortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, 
and virtue had its due reward, and all would have 
been well. But Shakespeare would not have it so. 
Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its 
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was 
contented to take the truth from life; and the, effect 
upon the mind of the most correct theory of what 
life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life 
itself, is infinitesimal in comparison." 



92 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Chateaubriand, whom some people consider him- 
self somewhat shallow and showy, speaks of Ham-. 
let as : "This tragedy of maniacs, this royal bedlam 
in which every character is either crazy or criminal, 
in which feigned madness is added to real madness, 
and in which the grave itself furnishes the stage with 
the skull of a fool, etc." 

All which shows that tastes differ, and that the 
yardstick of French, or even German, philosophy 
and criticism is not the measure for the orbed genius 
of the greatest of poets. 

The question so often started, so much and so 
ably discussed, of Hamlet's madness seems to be 
hardly a question at all, though each critic has his 
theory. Hamlet says he will feign madness ; and, 
even when so feigned, it is most doubtful to the per- 
sons of the drama, and should not be so at all to the 
audience. The whole thing seems to turn upon a 
play upon words. If we are all mad, as some 
allege, Hamlet was mad. Was he then sane.? If 
sanity means perfect health of mind, body and soul, 
surely not. Who is.-' Certainly we have here a 
soul in sore distress, a willow bending before the 
storm of life, bending this way and that, even as old 
saws advise, and yet at last wrenched from its rooted 
bed and swept into utter vacuity and failure, because 
it obeyed the law of its being and was a willow and 
not an oak ? Yet oaks, too, go down before tem- 
pests sent for their rending, even as willows are torn 
up when the hurricane strikes them. The resistance 
of the one or of the other is merely a measure of the 
force of the tornado. But, willow or oak, Hamlet 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 93 

was not equal to "the blast from Hell" he en- 
countered. 

We must remember, too, that, in the old legend, 
Hamlet's madness was but put on, for a purpose. 
And if Shakespeare makes it real, not feigned, what 
lesson are the sound in mind to draw from it.? 
Ophelia's madness was real ; if Hamlet's also, then 
would we have upon the stage the counterplay of a 
mad hero and a mad heroine — "a mad world, my 
masters ; " Bedlam brought home to us as the picture 
of mankind. That noble and majestic reason was 
harshly wrung no doubt, but not overthrown. If 
the scenes of this drama are but pictures of lunacy, 
its moral purpose might be as well subserved by a 
book of dreams, the shuffled cards dealt by Incubus 
to the sleeping, 

I have shown how the commentators ring the 
changes on every crotchet and conceit that may be 
imagined. But, after all, it is to Goethe that we owe 
the clue that has led to the solution of the question, 
first and last, of the significance of Hamlet. Was 
not Goethe right (p. ^t^i) when he says: "They 
come and ask me what idea I meant to embody in 
my Faust.? As if I knew and could tell ! To depict 
the reign of love, of hatred, of hope, or despair, and 
whatever the states and passions of the soul may be, 
is native to the poet, and it is his success simply to 
represent them." 

Does Shakespeare, indeed, intend at all in Hamlet, 
to propound a theory, to elucidate a fundamental 
principle.? Not perhaps as a formula, but surely in 
concrete human form. There is in it a man and an 



94 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 

idea. Is it not the true solution of the entire mystery, 
that Shakespeare meant to portray a Man, the great- 
est of all the mysteries of creation — with what 
lesson we may derive from that man's failure ? The 
Prince of Denmark is not an epitome of the virtues 
and vices, but a man, a real man, a Ijuman soul in 
contest with fate. We mount with him, and tread 
the airy paths of the spirit ; with him we look into 
the seething depths of our natures and see suggested 
there, in Hamlet's indecision and abdication of the 
issue of events to circumstance, the defeat of the 
human will in its war with destiny, and that aspect 
of our being, which, however insoluble, forever 
stares at us — the very Gethsemane of the finite soul, 
the impotence of man in the world of spirit. This is 
the chief value, this the perennial interest, this the 
real significance of this wonderful drama. 

Hamlet and Macbeth are, as has been often shown, 
the complements of each other in the tragic presenta- 
tion of one of the most momentous questions that 
ever engaged the mind of man — that of the personal 
responsibility of the individual for his actions. Each 
of these plays propounds this problem for our solu- 
tion after its own fashion. There are different ways 
of putting and answering questions. Socrates had 
his way, a most unfair one truly, however skilful and 
delightful. So they may be put and answered in 
sermons or iii squibs ? Shakespeare put his in stage 
plays, and answered them in enigmas. This great 
question of Fate and Free Will, or some aspects of it 
he debates in both Hamlet and Macbeth. Answer, 
Macbeth, in thine own way, and thou, Hamlet, in 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 95 

thine. Take thy unhallowed will, like the image of 
a false god, Macbeth, into the temple of thy soul, and 
pass through the fire to Moloch. And, thou, Hamlet, 
cast thy purposes like jetsam from a struggling ship, 
upon the waste of waters, and leave thy helm to play 
of wind and wave, and the hulk shall drift till the re- 
morseless sea devour all. Macbeth teaches the pri- 
iRal duty of rectitude of will ; Hamlet, of decision of 
will. The former rebukes the vacillation which hes- 
itates between right and wrong, the latter the vacil- 
lation between action and procrastination. Macbeth 
says, ' • Shall I do it, right or wrong .? " Hamlet, " Right 
or wrong, I cannot do it 1 " Each pays the penalty of 
his sin. The claim, the right, the obligation, the ne- 
cessity, in the scheme of Providence, of the energetic 
exercise of a free will is the grand ethical and theo- 
logical lesson taught in Hamlet, This is its lesson 
for all men, as I have striven heretofore to explain ; 
but that Shakespeare intended it originally for a nar- 
rower and more special and personal scope and 
application I think is most probable, and this I shall 
endeavor to show hereafter in these lectures. 

Without citing the libraries which have been writ- 
ten on Hamlet, the quotations I have given from 
some of the grandest thinkers of modern times 
evince the influence of the play and its creator upon 
the world of thought. Its germ of Doubt has become 
a full blown skepticism : its individual scrupulosity 
a widespread habit of mind. This is curiously illus- 
trated in the Journal of Amiel, translated by the 
gifted author of Robert Elsmere, who seems to have 
found in the Swiss professor the prototype for at least 



q6 the prototype of hamlet. 

two of her characters. Hamlet was mtended as a 
warning aganist hesitation ; Amiel saturates himself 
with Hamlet, and, as" Hamlet, becomes hesitation 
incarnate. 

Amiel says, 8th Novr 1852, "Responsibility is my 
invisible nightmare. To suffer through one's own 
fault is a torment worthy of the lost, for so grief is 
envenomed by ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, 
that which springs from shame of oneself. My priv- 
ilege is to be the spectator of my own life drama, 
to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own 
destiny — that is to say, to be unable to take my own 
illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from 
the theatre on the stage, or to be like a man looking 
from beyond the tomb into existence ; " and much 
more to the same effect. He tells us, "Shakespeare 
must have experienced this feeling often, and Ham- 
let must express it somewhere." So Amiel, neglect- 
ing the purpose of the poet and the moral of the 
play, and fascinated by the opium dream of vacilla- 
tion in Hamlet, spent thirty years in " craven scruple 
of thinking too precisely on the event," making small 
mark upon his time, and left for legacy some cloud- 
work of introspective psychology, and for warning 
his failure in life's purpose. Hamlet's influence on 
the life of this man, who extorts a languid admiration, 
may be illustrated by the following extracts from his 
Journal, which are curiously illustrative. 

"6th July, 1853. "Why, in general, am I better 
fitted for what is difficult than for what is easy. Al- 
ways for the same reason. I cannot bring myself to 
move freely, to show myselt without a veil, to act on 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



97 



my own account and act seriously, to believe in and 
assert myself, whereas a piece of badinage which 
diverts attention from myself to the thing in hand, 
from the feeling- to the skill of the writer, puts me at 
my ease. It is timidity which is at the bottom of it. 
There is another reason too, — -I am afraid of great- 
ness, I am not afraid of ingenuity, and, distrustful as 
I am of my gift and my instrument, I like to reassure 
myself by an elaborate practice of execution. All 
my published literary essays, therefore, are little else 
than studies, games, exercises, for the purpose of 
testing myself. I play scales, as it were ; I run up 
and down my instrument, I train my hand, and 
make sure of its capacity and skill. But the work 
itself remains unachieved. My effort expires, and, 
satisfied with the power to act, I never arrive at the 
will to act. I am always preparing and never 
accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in 
a kind of barren curiosity — .these are the two obsta- 
cles which bar against me a literary career. Nor 
must procrastination be forgotten. I am always 
reserving for the future what is 'great, serious, and 
important, and meanwhile I am eager to exhaust 
what is pretty and trifling." This is a long draught of 
Amiel, and I would not indulge myself in parading 
what may, in one sejise, be but the morbid mask- 
ing of a recluse, out worn with self-contemplation ; 
but every close student of Hamlet will recognize in 
this self-portraiture an able and critical study, an 
exact portrayal, of the mind of Hamlet. The disciple 
had lost himself in his master. 

Again Amiel tells us : " Every situation is an 



^8 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

equilibrium of forces ; every life is a struggle between 
opposing forces working within the limits of a cer- 
tian equiHbrium." "The man who insists upon see- 
ing with perfect clearness before he decides, never 
decides." "I am always trifling with the present 
moment Feeling in me is retrospective. My refrac- 
tory nature is slow to recognize the solemnity of 
the hour in which I actually stand. An ironical 
instinct, born of timidity, makes me pass lightly 
over what I have, on pretence of waiting for some 

other thing at some other time I trifle even 

with happiness out of distrust of the future." These 
instances could be multiplied to any extent : but it 
is Hamlet, not Amiel, we have to deal with, and it 
is only because Amiel was a Hamlet in actual life, 
painting his prototype, while trying to photograph 
himself, that we reproduce and dwell upon his 
words so fully here. 

As with Amiel the Genevese, so with Goethe and 
the German host, who have enlisted under the ban- 
ners of Hamlet ; to all these, and to thinkers and 
dreamers everywhere, the tragedy of Hesitation has 
o'ertopped the tragedy of Action. Hamlet reigns. 
Pontius Pilate washed his hands, saying, "I am 
innocent of the blood of this just person " : but all 
the waves of the ocean and all the tides of time will 
not wash his soul clean from the blood-guilt he 
incurred when he refused to do what he knew was 
right. We cannot avoid the responsibility of action 
by delay, or words of renunciation. 

In Hamlet, Shakespeare's fundamental canon of 
dramatic construction, organic unity in the action, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



99 



is apparently violated, but not really so. The condi- 
tions which ordinarily lead to a sin of commission 
culminate here in a sin of omission. The interest is 
maintained up to the crisis, which consists, not in a 
fatal decision of the hero, but in a fatal indecision. 
It is the prince's failure to act, to do, at the point of 
fate, what the audience has a right to expect him to 
do, that culminates in — procrastination. His defect 
of will is the crisis. He lets slip his opportunity, 
and evades the appointed task. He shirks his re- 
sponsibility, and pursues a waiting policy. His is 
a Fabian campaign, a sort of generalship, which, 
successful once in history, has served since as the 
apology for a thousand military abortions. In the 
latter half of Hamlet, the action is necessarily incon- 
sequential. As the crisis consisted in an abdication 
of volition, it could have no consequences. Anarchy 
ensued in the moral government of the situation, 
until Fate, taking up the abandoned sceptre, decided 
a cause whose arbitrament belonged properly to the 
realm of the human will. What redeems this part of 
the play is the succession of brilliant stage situations 
springing from the intrigue and involutions of plot, 
together with the splendid lights and shades of a 
soul displayed under the electric glow of Shake- 
speare's psychology. 

And yet we are not to believe that this movement 
in Hamlet is any more a mistake, or less profound, 
than that which dictates the motif of some grand 
operatic performance. A believer in Shakespeare's 
keen common-sense, his mastery of the theatre in 
all its aspects, and his artistic and literary insight, 



lOO THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

will not concede that the rhythm of the action in 
Hamlet is an accident even, or that the suspense, 
the ebb and flow of the tragic tide, and the unex- 
pectedness — the lightning bolt — of the royal calam- 
ity, ^schylean in its final inevitableness, are other 
than parts of a purpose, the harmony of perfect art. 
The master knew what he was about, and, to produce 
desired effects, used the right means to the proposed 
end, putting aside all others. 

I have said that in the unfolding of this great 
drama of fate and free-will, Shakespeare taught his 
lesson by bringing within range of our mental vision 
the soul of a man. This is the true solution ; and, 
when we say a man, we mean a particular man, 
not man — a type, a generalization, an abstraction, 
a phantasy, which never existed, and never will. 
But what man ? It has been often said, and well 
said, that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare turned out his 
own soul for the study of the world. Kreyssig 
(p. 302) declares that, "From the rich troop of his 
heroes, Shakespeare has chosen Hamlet, as the ex- 
ponent, to the spectators and to posterity, of all that 
lay nearest to his own heart." 

Kenny (p. 177) beautifully expresses a thought 
more or less clearly shadowed by many others: 
"Hamlet is, in some sense, Shakespeare's most typi- 
cal work. In no other of his dramas does his high- 
est personality seem to blend so closely with his 
highest genius. It is throughout informed with his 
skepticism, his melancholy, his ever-present sense of 
the shadowiness and the fleetingness of life." But 
perhaps Hazlitt more clearly strikes the keynote 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS, ioi 

when he says, (p. 155), "It is we who are Hamlet." 
In " Hamlet's Traits of Character," "by a No Phil- 
osopher" (p. 351), the correct view of Shakespeare's 
mode of literary production herein is well set forth. 
'' It is not in Hamlet, as in other pieces of Shake- 
speare's, the history of a single passion, the develop- 
ment of a few mental qualities, good or bad, that is 
set before us. In this drama Shakespeare sets him- 
self a greater task ; to make clear and intelligible 
from the whole structure of the piece, a human soul 
in its totality, in its fluctuating action, and in the 
finest vibrations by which the nerves are thrilled. 
This drama may not, indeed, be a mere portraiture of 
character, but yet a development, or rather a self un- 
folding, of a character face to face with the misery 
of this world. According to this design of the 
whole, Shakespeare does not mark single defects, 
but, painting and adding, he unfolds, partly by 
action and partly by inaction, the lineaments which 
combine to form a piquant and original portrait." 

The truth often lies between the extremes of 
interpretation. Hamlet may be conceived as not 
deficient in ordinary will power, as equal to the 
exigencies of ordinary affairs, or even more largely 
endowed. But still the situation in which he is 
placed is beyond his powers. Perhaps he is not to 
be blamed for want of success, which mortals cannot 
command ; but we feel, time and again, that he pro- 
nounces his own condemnation, which the circum- 
stances justify, when he trifles with his opportunity. 
" Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; 



I02 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action. ' ' 

This is the explanation of Hamlet's defect and the 
warning to all like him. . And his self-reproaches in 
Act 2, Scene 2, are echoes of this thought. 

" Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I, " etc. . . . 

"But I am pigeon livered and lack gall 
To make oppression bitter. ' ' 

One of the surest ways to misread and misinterpret 
the true spirit and purpose of this play, or of any of 
Shakespeare's plays, is to presuppose that the Dram- 
atist, the Poet, the Maker, has violated the funda- 
mental law of poetical production. Poetry is creation, 
not analysis. It is a correlation of spiritual forces 
with their material forms, resulting in a concrete 
entity. Science may dissect it, criticism may ex- 
pound it, but, unless a soul has been breathed into it 
by the inspiration of genius, it must be "a thing of 
shreds and patches," a puppet, a skeleton perhaps, 
but not a living, enduring poem ; and in no form of 
poetry is this more true than in the drama. As Cole- 
ridge says of him, "Shakespeare is the Spinozistic 
deity — an omnipresent creativeness." Shakespeare, 
of all men, did not plan Moralities, did not dress up 
abstractions — Virtue, Loyalty, Piety, etc., — to act a 
little charade. Had he done so the dust of centuries 
would have entombed his dramas, along with the 
Miracle Plays and Moralities of his predecessors. 
But they live. And why.? Because they were born, 
not made ; of poem, as well as of poet, it is true, 
" Nasciiur, nonjii." 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 103 

Shakespeare's persons of the drama are veritable 
men, not lay figures ; and they are organic men, not 
mechanical toys — manikins. In each we behold 
Shakespeare's conception of an individual, often 
grander, more heroic, in proportions, than the origi- 
nal, because Shakespeare himself was greater. And 
thus with care we may discover in his portraits the 
original, plus the hand, the head, the kindly smile, 
the capacious brain of the artist himself. 

Hence, as Hazlitt says, Hamlet is a portrait. 
Whose portrait he was originally intended for is one 
thing ; what he became in process of development is 
another. Far be it from me to deny that in the 
completed Hamlet who speaks to us from the Second 
Quarto, who speaks to us from under the vizard of 
Booth, we hear a voice that is truly Shakespeare's. 
We do see his veritable likeness there, and our own 
also. The great dramatist has projected himself 
into his creation, and taught him to utter the 
thoughts that shook his own high-wrought soul as 
it trembled in the balance. This is one side of the 
many-sided man, at a critical juncture of his life, and 
the speculation and wide discourse that flash from 
the lips of the melancholy Dane are inspirations 
such as the Delphic God gave out through the voice 
of his human oracle. 

If we cast aside his inky robes, and consider 
young Hamlet, not as a prince, but as a man, we 
discove/the secret of his wide and perennial interest 
for us. The image of the philosophic soul, reflected 
from the mirror of the poet's mind, stands posed in 
sweetness and strength, like a demi-god. Before it is 



I04 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

the heavy burthen of life, weighted with cares, with 
conflicting and doubtful duties, with certain peril, 
and. with possible crime. In the shadowy lines of 
the spirit we behold the intellect perplexed, the con- 
science appalled, the will paralyzed, and the whole 
man borne down in a vain struggle with destiny. 
Equipped from a full armory with every weapon of 
the intellect, a fatal defect of will mars and ruins all. 
Is not such a picture, projected from the depths 
of the poet's nature for the teaching of the world, 
an open confession as it were, a cryitig aloud ; "I 
have sinned?" Here is "that unmatched form 
and feature of blown youth, blasted with ecstasy," 
and "quite, quite, down;" "and, in his up-shot, 
purposes mistook fallen on the inventors' heads." 
Purpose, decision, prompt and resolute action, this is 
the lesson for the King, for the Court, for us, for 
the world, for future generations, and, perhaps, most 
of all. for the easing of the poet's own heart and 
conscience. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 105 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF HAMLET. 

" Unless my study and my books be false, 
The argument you held was wrong." 

I Hanry VI., I. i. 

If my interpretation of the Significance of Hamlet 
seems to any one more like to a cento of others' 
opinions than to a cast of my own thought, I might 
plead a goldsmith's apology, who should think his 
jewel none the worse that it showed more of gems 
than of setting. But of this excuse I will not avail 
myself, for, little as I may obtrude my own views, 
they are the conclusions of a quarter of a century of 
mingled interested inquiry and unconscious cere- 
bration. My theories of Shakespeare and his works, 
such as they are, have been fused over the slow tires 
of a lifetime of admiring contemplation, for I cannot 
call it real study : and the treasures that I have im- 
bedded in the slag of my essay are there as illustra- 
tions—forcible for intrinsic worth, or beautiful for 
expression— of results obtained through my own 
examination and independent reflection. So much, 
I may be permitted by way of apology for my 
method. 

Who wrote Hamlet .? Shakespeare, of course ! 
But is it of course } The Baconian theory aside, it is 
conceded that Shakespeare did write the play, as it 



Io6 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

is presented to us in the best modern texts, and as 
it is acted by the most reputable tragedians. But 
where did the play come from, and how much of it 
is really Shakespeare's in kernel, as well as in shell ? 
This has seemed to be a hard nut for Shakespearians 
to crack, and this lecture is designed to show that it 
is more simple than has been imagined, and that 
many of the difficulties were rather of men's own 
making than intrinsic to the subject. 

Modern criticism agrees that there were three plays 
called Hamlet. Our accepted version, which is sub- 
stantially tb^ same in all the best recent editions, 
with mere slight verbal deviations and varying con- 
structions, rests upon the volume published in 1623 
by the companions of Shakespeare, and known as the 
First Folio, as verified and modified by reference to 
the edition authorized by Shakespeare himself, the 
Second Quarto of 1604, which it probably followed. 
All the best modern editions may be regarded as 
containing the genuine Hamlet, and are as nearly 
Shakespeare's as human research can rehabilitate the 
thought of three centuries ago. The Second Quarto, 
on which they finally rest, is distinctively and assur- 
edly genuine. It is not merely Shakespearian, it is 
Shakespeare's ; it is Shakespeare ! Let us name 
it the Last Hamlet. 

It is well known how indifferent, if not averse, to 
the publication of his plays was Shakespeare, as were 
many other dramatists of his day. It is, however, 
sufficiently clear why he authorized the publica- 
tion of Hamlet in 1604 in the form known as the 
Second Quarto. In 1603 an edition of Hamlet was 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 107 

printed, now known as the First Quarto. The title 
of this book was : "The tragicall Historic of Ham- 
let Prince, of Denmarke By William Shakespeare. 
As ithathbeene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse 
seruants in the Cittie of London : as also in the two 
Vniuersities of Cambridg-e and Oxford, and else- 
where. " The next year the Second Quarto was pub- 
lished with the following title-page : "The Tragi- 
call Historic of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. "^j 
William ^Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and en- 
larged to almost as much again as it was, according 
to the true and perfect Coppie, " etc., 1604." The two 
versions vary widely, and there has been much dis- 
pute as to why they should so differ, when printed 
so nearly together, and each purporting to give 
Shakespeare's play. 

There are three theories as to the intrinsic character 
of Quarto First (Q i). One theory is that it is merely 
a mangled copy of the true version as we have it in 
Quarto Second ; and that the discrepancies between 
them are due to the fact that it was carelessly taken 
down in short-hand, during the representation, and 
that the blanks were filled in from memory by an 
incompetent person, who mutilated and marred it in 
the reproduction. This view necessarily attributes 
the authorship to Shakespeare. 

A second theory is summed up in the view taken 
by the Clarendon Editors, and is thus entitled to all 
the weight mere authority can give, though they 
admit that it is "conjectural, and based to a large 
extent on subjective considerations." According to 
this theory we have in the Second Quarto, for the 



lo8 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

first time, the Hamlet of Shakespeare. The Claren- 
don Editors reach this conclusion, although "in 
the Quarto of 1603 we have the whole 'action' of 
the play : that is to say, the events follow very 
much in the same order, and the catastrophe is the 
same." The following is their view: " we venture 
to think that a close examination of Quarto First will 
convince any one that it contains some of Shake- 
speare's undoubted work, mixed with a great deal 
that is not his, and will confirm our theory that the 
text, imperfect as it is, represents an older play in a 
transition state, while it was undergoing a remodel- 
ling, but had not received more than the first rough 
touches of the great master's hand." 

This opinion has been held by many eminent 
commentators ; but, on the other hand, the weight of 
authority rests with a third theory, that Q i, though 
evidently an older and feebler play than the Last 
Hamlet, — Q2 — , was in fact largely, if not altogether, 
Shakespeare's work, and gives the play as it was 
performed before it was recast by the author about 
1596, or 1597, and as it now exists. 

When the Hamlet of Q 2 took its form, it is not quite 
easy to say. Singer puts the date at 1597, Malone 
at 1600. Richard Grant White and Clark and Wright 
place the date between 1598 and 1602. I prefer the 
earliest of these dates, or even 1596, as the initial, 
point of the Last Hamlet, though its revision may have 
lasted till 1603, and, it is not improbable, considering 
the ways of authors, that even after the pirated First 
Quarto was published, and when the Second Quarto 
was in its birth-throes, in 1604, Shakespeare may 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 109 

have welcomed its coming with some rose of poesy, 
or set therein as a coronal for the newcome Prince, 
Scotch James, or Hamlet the Perennial, some of the 
jewels we prize the most. 

" In 1 597 the Lord Admiral's players were restrained 
for a time from playing, in consequence of having 
brought out Nash's Isle of Dogs, a play in which 
personal satire was probably introduced, and for 
which the author was imprisoned. " (Hamlet, Clar. 
Ed. Preface). Nothing is said of "Innovation," or 
"Inhibition," in Q i, which contains the old cast of 
Hamlet ; but Q 2 has in regard to the Gonzago play- 
ers, " I think their inhibition comes by the means of 
the late innovation. '' This is not without significance 
as to the point of time when the recast of the play 
was made ; for if the Inhibition was but just issued 
when Shakespeare was rewriting Hamlet, nothing 
could be more natural than an allusion to it as a 
matter. of deepest interest to actors and playgoers. 

The Second Quarto is declared to be a "true and 
perfect copy," "newly imprinted and enlarged to 
almost as much again as it was." The First Quarto, 
on the other hand, only claims to be an actor's 
copy, " Hamlet," "as it has been divers times acted 
by his Highness' servants," etc. These phrases 
probably express the true distinction between them. 
There was no wish, or inclination, on the part of the 
Company of The King's Players, to which Shake- 
speare belonged, to publish its plays, the repertory of 
which, while it remained exclusively its own, con- 
stituted a valuable stock-in-trade. But, it is probable 
that in 1603 there was a lively public interest in the 



1 1 o THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

popular play of Hamlet, and, to profit by this, an 
"enterprising" publisher, one " N. L.," procured and 
put upon the market an actor's copy, probably an 
imperfect one that had been cast aside — likely enough, 
one that had been used at one of the Universities 
mentioned in the imprint, and which had fallen into 
"innocuous desuetude." But in the meantime, the 
great dramatist had rewritten and expanded this play 
which had formerly held the stage, and which neither 
he, nor his company, was now willing to acknowledge 
as the full-grown child of his genius. He does not 
repudiate the First Qnarto, as not his work, in the 
imprint of Q 2, but suggests its imperfections, its 
incorrectness and its obsolete form. Quarto Second 
was issued from a correct copy of this new cast of 
the play, though it was printed with the customary 
carelessness of the age. 

The discrepancies between the two forms of the 
play are too marked to permit the supposition that the 
one is a mere mutilation of the other; and, inferior 
as Q I is to Q 2, it is too consistent, and too good an 
acting play as it stands, to be accepted as a mere 
fragment. To my mind Q 2 exhibits change, process 
and development from Q i ; and in conception as 
well as in form. It contains three thousand seven 
hundred and nineteen lines, while Q i numbers only 
two thousand one hundred and forty three lines, 
nearly verifying the statement of the imprint, that it 
had been enlarged to almost as much again. The 
language differs widely, the order of scenes is not 
the same, and even the names ofpersonsof the drama 
are changed. In Q i, Polonius is Corambis ; Rey- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS, m 

naldo, Montano ; Osric, "a braggart gentleman ; " and 
there are other minor variations in the names. But 
the play itself is substantially and essentially the 
same; " all the ac/io« of the amended Hamlet is to 
be found in the first sketch ; " and this is a very 
essential point. 

The First Quarto had independent merits of its 
own, sufficient, indeed, to commend it to a certain 
class of minds as the better form of stage play even, 
and it has served as the basis of such plays in Ger- 
many. This, however, is chiefly due to its brevity 
and greater rapidity of action. Iji it the actual mad- 
ness of Hamlet appears more probable, while in Q. 2 
the language that might lead us to believe that mad- 
ness real is modified. So the guilt of the Queen is 
more emphasized in Q 2 ; and other points of diff"er- 
ence might be noted. 

Knight well says: "The character of Hamlet is 
fully conceived in the original play, whenever he is 
in action. It is the contemplative part of his nature 
which is elaborated in the perfect copy." The great- 
est and most radical change from the earliert to the 
later tragedy, however, is in the infusion of a loftier 
tone of thought. The former was a drama of plot 
and situations ; but the speculative reason of Shake- 
speare has breathed into the mature Hamlet his own 
spirit, which finds play in its noblest passages. 
Much more might be said, but the main point is that 
the earlier play served only as the stalk and bud for 
the great tragedy, and that in the full blown Hamlet 
we have the flower of Shakespeare's admirable judg- 
ment and ripe imagination. 



1 1 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T. 

I have said there were three Hamlets. The last 
Hamlet, that of Q 2, undoubtedly Shakespeare's, 
which substantially took its present cast about 1597 ; 
the earlier Hamlet of Q i, in parts questionably 
Shakespeare's, according to some critics ; and an- 
other, or the First Hamlet. My theory of Q i is that 
it was a stage copy of the earlier version, and was 
probably dropped from the stage by Shakespeare's 
Company, in or before, 1596, or possibly on account' 
of the Inhibition in 1597 ; although it may have been 
produced by amateurs elsewhere, "at the Universi- 
ties, " later. It was printed for the first time in 1603, 
and, crude as it appears to us, must present the 
drama after it had been considerably developed from 
its original rudimentary form, by accretions, sugges- 
tions and amendments. 

Corrupt as is the text, and inferior as Q. i may seem 
to some, it evinces in every part the essential feat- 
ures of a Shakespearian creation. The only doubt 
of this is based upon intrinsic evidence of very 
shadowy texture. But at all events it is the earliest 
form of the play remaining to us. The earliest draft 
of the tragedy — the First Hamlet — is a hypothetical 
play, of which no copy exists, and which we cannot 
certainly prove was at all different from Q i, but 
which may be assumed to have existed, and which 
might well be entitled, " Hamlet, Revenge ! ", as it 
was mockingly called by Shakespeare's satirists. 

We have now traced this play backward to its ear- 
liest verified form. Writers generally agree that 
an inceptive play, or original cast of a play, called 
Hamlet, did exist, and was acted as early as 1589, or 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 113 

fourteen years before Q i was prin4;ed. As to whether 
this is the play we have in Q i, or not, there has been 
discussion. If not contained in Q i, it is no longer 
extant. We have no certain proof that Q i does not 
contain this original cast of Hamlet, but the circum- 
stances lead to a contrary belief, and to the view 
that it is much developed from the first sketch. 
Fleay says, Hamlet is " Founded on an older play 
now lost." 

It has been generally assumed, or admitted with- 
out question, that this original play was not com- 
posed by Shakespeare, but by some one else, though 
some of the most learned and careful of his editors 
see no ground for such an opinion. While these 
lectures may add little that is really new to the 
knowledge of a subject which has been so thoroughly 
examined by patient scholarship, and while no abso- 
lute demonstration can be made of any theory of it 
without the discovery of additional evidence, yet it 
is hoped that the facts herein presented will at least 
throw upon the genesis and evolution of this drama 
a light strong and clear enough to exhibit who was its 
original author, and when, how, and why, it was 
written. 

And if it should turn out that my contention in the 
matter is right, and that William Shakespeare was the 
builder of Hamlet from the bottom up, my hearers 
may conclude that the upshot is much like "the 
Dutch takmg Holland." But then again it is some- 
thing if we can prove once in a while that things are 
what they seem, and that to the common-sense of 
mankind is occasionally accorded a clearer vision of 



114 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

the truth than to the combined green-goggles and 
strabismus of Hterary thaumaturgists. 

There is diversity of opinion as to who wrote the 
original play. Usually, the burden of proof would 
rest upon those who deny the first conception of a 
play to its author ; here this rule of evidence has been 
reversed, and it is assumed that Shakespeare did not 
originate Hamlet. Halliwell, whose opinion, as such, 
is entitled to the greatest deference, sums up one 
theory as follows in his "Dictionary of Old Plays." 
He cites : "Hamlet. A play with this title acted at 
Newington Theatre by the Lord Admiral's and Lord 
Chamberlain's men, June 9th, 1594. It preceded 
Shakespeare's tragedy, and is several times alluded 
to by contemporary writers." 

This statement takes for granted the point at issue, 
but it rests solely upon conjecture, and no extrinsic 
evidence is offered to prove who was the author. 
Now, as has been said, either Q 1 represents the 
earliest draft of Hamlet, or, as is more generally 
believed, there was a still ruder version in possession 
of the stage for many years, as stated by Halliwell. 
If the former supposition be true, whoever else had a 
hand in it, it was, to all intents and purposes, Shake- 
speare's. If the latter, we shall have to consider what 
other tragic author so well satisfies the conditions 
required for its production. To my mind the evidence 
appears conclusive that the same hand laid the founda- 
tion that placed the capstone upon this admirable 
literary edifice. As I have said before, the burden of 
proof rests upon those who deny its authorship to 
the man whom contemporary opinion, with no glim- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 115 

mer of a doubt, assigned it to. Let us review the 
evidence. 

The Clarendon Editors hold that the internal evi- 
dence shovi^s that Q i vi^as inadequate to the genius 
of Shakespeare. Much more so would be a lamer, 
ruder, version of the play. In 1597 he was, indeed, 
capable of greater things — of the greatest, — for it was 
then that he wrote the last Hamlet ; but ten years 
earlier, when it was first hatched, his was a fledgling's 
wing, and not the flight of the eagle. But even then 
it would be difficult to point to any one in 1587, or 
1588, capable of producing it, except Shakespeare 
himself, or perhaps Marlowe. Hence Fleay (Shake- 
speare Manual, p. 41) says, "I have little doubt that 
the early Hamlet of 1589 was written by Shakespeare 
and Marlowe in conjunction, and that portions of it 
can be traced in Quarto First, as Gorambis Hamlet." 

On the other hand, much of the argument by other 
advocates of a prae-Shakespearian play is directed 
against Shakespeare's ability in 1589, aged 25 — much 
less in 1585, aged 21, — to produce even a rough draft 
of Hamlet, or indeed any sketch at all for the stage. 
Whatever may be the weight of either argument, they 
do not consist. They are mutally destructive ; and, 
indeed, the truth probably lies between the extremes. 
Shakespeare at 21 could not have produced the 
Hamlet we have, to which these critics evidently 
revert, but he was quite adequate to the original play, 
and better able to write it than any other man. It 
would seem that those who deny to Shakespeare the 
authorship of the original draft of Hamlet should 
suggest who else did, or could, compose it. If it 



Ii6 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

were a work of genius, and even the germ of Hamlet 
must have had merit, who besides Shakespeare, or 
Marlowe, could have written it ? If it were crude, 
or rude, with the mere potentialities of its supreme 
excellence, why could not the same man originate it, 
who subsequently developed it? Is not any other 
conjecture mere guesswork, or a mythopoic process? 

Timmins, in his preface to the Devonshire Ham- 
lets, says, "My conviction is that in Q i we have a 
' rough hewn ' draft of a noble drama, (written prob- 
ably in 1 587-1 589). Fleay also puts the first Ham- 
let in 1589. Some writers place its date even earlier, 
and Furness, with all the lights before him, fixes on 
1585-6. But we can safely say that it must have 
been written before 1589 — as early as 1588 — to call 
forth the satirical allusions to it, written by rival 
authors in 1589, which recognized it as a well known 
play then ; and, there can be scarcely a doubt that it 
must have appeared in the previous year, 1587, or 
even in 1586, to have come into public notice and 
favor by 1589. 

The following incidental opinion from one of the 
more brilliant critics of Shakespeare has its value. 

" Thus, since, he certainly possessed a share in 
the theatre, in 1589, we may well credit the account 
of the performances, in that very year, of his Ham- 
let ; that is, as it was first played, wanting its present 
grander poetry and passion. We have no vestige of 
Hamlet in its first state ; but if it was not superior to 
his Romeo and Juliet, before that tragedy was re- 
written, there is not the slightest difficulty in sup- 
posing it was one of his first dramatic attempts," 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS, ny 

(Chas. Armitag-e Brown in "Shakespeare's Autobio- 
graphical Poems," p, 28). 

Chas, Knight, who cannot be too much commended 
for the spirit in which he edited Shakespeare and the 
methods he employed, says : 

" Not a tittle of evidence exists to show that there 
was any play of Hamlet but that of Shakespeare ; and 
all the collateral evidence upon which it is inferred 
that an earlier play of Hamlet than Shakespeare's 
did exist, may, on the other hand, be taken to prove 
that Shakespeare's sketch was in repute at an earlier 
period than is commonly assigned to its date." He 
concludes that "the Taming of the Shrew and Ham- 
let were both very early productions of Shakespeare." 
There is scarcely a doubt that Romeo and Juliet 
belongs to the same period. Knight's view is held 
substantially by a number of the ablest commentators 
on Shakespeare, though they differ in details ; among 
others, Delius, Elze, Staunton, and Gervinus. 

To my mind the strongest argument against Shake- 
speare's authorship of the earlier play is the dictum 
of the Clarendon Editors, whom I have always found 
it unwise hastily to disagree with. In philological 
questions and the decision of disputed interpretations, 
they evince a skill and critical faculty rarely at fault. 
Indeed, if they had not assigned their reasons for it, 
their decision, usually so judicious, would be almost 
conclusive with me. But when they allege, "a com- 
plete absence of positive evidence," "for Shake- 
speare's connection with the play before 1602," they 
go too far. They all quote, as "strong negative 
evidence", the omission of Hamlet from a hst of 



1 1 8 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

Shakespeare's plays made by Francis Meres in 1598. 
But this is a non sequitur, as other of his plays were 
omitted in the list, and plays which are doubtful were 
included in it, as Titus Andronicus and Love's Labor's 
Won. But, to save the point of the omission, the 
Clarendon Editors exclude from the catalogue of 
Shakespeare's plays, Pericles and Henry VI, which 
are not mentioned in Meres' list. 

The whole value of Meres' List, as evidence, may 
be summed up as follows. Francis Meres, a schol- 
arly and competent writer, in his "Wits' Treasury," 
in 1598, gives the first direct notice of Shake- 
speare's works, naming twelve of his plays, among 
which Hamlet is not mentioned. He places Shake- 
speare, as a poet, with Homer, Virgil and Ovid and the 
Greek Tragedians, and with Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, 
Drayton, Warner, Marlowe and Chapman, the most 
admired poets of his own age. He adds, "AsPlautus 
and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and 
Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among 
the English is the most excellent in both kinds for 
the stage : for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of 
Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labor's Lost, his 
Love's Labor's Won, his Midsummer Night's Dream, 
and his Merchant of Venice ; for tragedy, his Richard 
n, Richard HI, Henry IV, King John, Titus An- 
dronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet." Identifying 
Love's Labor's Won as All's Well that Ends Well, are 
we to treat this as an accurate and exhaustive list of 
plays which had then been produced by Shakespeare ? 
It is almost certain that Henry VI (1st part), Pericles, 
The Taming of the Shrew, and probably Much Ado 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 119 

about Nothing were in existence when Meres printed 
his book. Nor does it seem to have been the intention 
of Meres to give this as a full list of Shakespeare's 
plays, else why does he employ this word " wit- 
ness," which seems to imply that his purpose was 
merely to cite his favorite plays, or those then most 
in vogue? And it might well be that the early plays 
not mentioned by him had, after a more or less 
successful career upon the stage, fallen into temporary 
neglect. Indeed, it might be conjectured that such 
partial eclipse induced Shakespeare to withdraw 
Hamlet from the stage for final study and revision 
about this time, which gave us his mature Hamlet, 
as we now have it, though I beg that no one will con- 
sider me as attaching undue importance to such mere 
conjectures. But it may have influenced him, as the 
Inhibition may likewise have weighed with him, and 
the death of his son, and domestic sorrows, and per- 
sonal discontents, and most of all the fullness of 
literary inspiration and its urgency and solicitings. 
I think, however, it will be admitted as significant that 
Meres does not mention Pericles, Henry VI, or the 
Taming of the Shrew, which without doubt had en- 
joyed popularity and were at least attributed to Shake- 
speare. And it is worth noting, too, that, at the date 
of Meres' pubHcation, 1598, Shakespeare's greatest 
plays had not been yet produced. For some reason 
that epoch opened to him the portals of a new spiritual 
life, and a new line of dramatic creation. Othello, 
Macbeth, Lear, Cymbeline, the Tempest, and many 
others, on which his reputation chiefly rests, followed 
his Last Hamlet. Thus, then, though the secondary 



I20 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

plays of Shakespeare placed him, at thirty-four years 
of age, in the estimation of Meres and his contempo- 
raries, with the greatest poets, and above all those 
who are held out to us as possible authors of Hamlet, 
we are asked to believe that, at twenty-three or twenty- 
four years of age, he lacked the invention to adapt an 
old legend to the stage, and had to depend upon some 
forerunner, who never otherwise evinced any capacity 
for great works, for help to lay out for him the ground 
plan of the play. It is Meres, too, who says, " that 
the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed 
phrase, if they would speak English," which I com- 
mend to those who have argued his personality away, 
or who portray him as a phantom or a fraud or an 
ignoramus. 

Malone (in 1821) says, " Perhaps the original 
Hamlet was written by Thomas Kyd, who was the 
author of one play, (and probably of more) to which 
no name is affixed. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, as 
in Shakespeare's Hamlet, there is, if I may say so, 
a play represented within a play ; if the old play of 
Hamlet should ever be recovered, a similar interlude, 
I make no doubt, would be found there," etc. But 
what of it.'' How does it matter.? There is nothing 
in this sort of criticism. The same device will be fre- 
quently found in the annals of the stage, as in the 
"Rehearsal." But facts appear, which are indeed 
curious, if we remember that Malone's hypothesis has 
been passed along from one commentator and histo- 
rian to another almost unquestioned. 

Skottowe and Collier, in turn, speak of "the old 
play of Hamlet," as antecedent to Shakespeare's, as 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 121 

if of course, but offer no proof. Lowndes, in his 
"Bibliographer's Manual," mentions " Kyd's old play 
of Hamlet." Dyce thinks that the First Hamlet 
' ' might have been written by Kyd. " All this proceeds 
upon the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a mere 
adapter of other man's plays, and could make none 
of his own — an entirely groundless assumption. 

Mr. Fleay puts down the Spanish Tragedy as prob- 
ably written before, 1589, though not published until 
1594. Symonds, in "Shakespeare's Predecessors" 
(page 486), describing "the Tragedy of Blood," as 
he calls it, says, "Thomas Kyd— ?/" Hieronymo and 
the Spanish Tragedy are correctly ascribed to him— 
may be called the founder of this species. About his 
life we know absolutely nothing, although it may be 
plausibly conjectured that he received a fair academi- 
cal education." Thus Hamlet is to be attributed to 
Kyd, about whom this able literary historian knows 
nothing, because of a supposed analogy to the 
Spanish Tragedy, the authorship of which is doubtful. 
And why .? Because each is a Tragedy of Blood, and 
has a play within a play. But this is rather a reason 
for assigning the foundling "Spanish Tragedy "to 
Shakespeare than Hamlet to Kyd. Here is one play 
of uncertain paternity with an interlude in it ; but 
almost all of Shakespeare's earliest plays have some- 
thing of the sort ; argal, Kyd wrote Hamlet ! 

Passing by the Gonzago Play in Hamlet, we find 
the Taming of the Shrew tacked on to an induction, 
and played before the famous Christopher Sly. It 
was produced about 1 589, and Hamlet the same year, 
or earlier, as Fleay tells us, and as is probable. 



1 2 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

Midsummer Night's Dream, written in 1592, if not 
earlier, has its play vi?-ithin a play — a most worshipful 
interlude ; and Love's Labor's Lost has a masque, in 
which rustic actors come in to be derided by the 
lords and ladies. The play within a play was a 
natural theatrical device at a period when the most 
favored part of the audience occupied seats on the 
stage, a survival of which appears in our modern 
fashionable and inconvenient proscenium boxes. It 
belonged, too, to a period of the utmost confusion in 
literary forms, when an ingenious combination of 
several plots was a frequent and favorite resort of the 
playwrights. The Masque was used constantly by 
Marston, Webster and Tourneur in their Tragedies ; 
and Greene has an Induction to his James IV., in 
which Oberon, King of the Fairies, has the chief part. 
The play within a play was a relic among the tradi- 
tions of the stage, and Shakespeare, or the manager 
under whom he wrote, retained it in his earlier 
dramas ; but his true artistic instinct soon disembar- 
rassed itself from an artifice more or less clumsy, and 
which lost its theatrical propriety as the drama 
assumed the form with which Shakespeare himself 
chiefly stamped it. 

Halliwell says in his edition of Karl Simrock's 
Remarks, in regard to the ascription of the earliest 
Hamlet to Thomas Kyd : "This is mere conjecture. 
If, as is most probable, an older play on the subject 
of Hamlet existed at the time when Shakespeare wrote 
his tragedy, we have no evidence whatever that will 
lead us to believe that it was written by Kyd." 

Here the case stands. No proof is adduced for the 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 123 

authorship of Kyd, who has been generally assumed 
to be the writer of the First Hamlet ; and for Marlowe's 
greater, or lesser, share in its composition, we have 
only such evidence as may be drawn from the con- 
clusion that he had an abler and more forceful genius 
than Shakespeare. It is not difficult to sympathize 
with the enthusiasm which seeks to rescue from an 
unmerited oblivion a genius like Marlowe's, and to 
rehabilitate it in the empire of thought. But his own 
proper niche must be assigned to each, and every 
statue must stand upon its own pedestal. We must 
not rob, or borrow, one shred of reputation from any 
other to deck him whom we would honor. ' Marlowe's 
fame must depend on Faustus, the Jew of Malta, and 
Edward II, and we can gain nothing by claiming for 
him without proof, the title to Hamlet. 

The whole theory of a prae-Shakespearian Hamlet 
proceeds upon the supposition that Shakespeare 
could not write it, but that somebody else could. 
Who was this somebody .? Why should Kyd, or 
even mighty Marlowe, be summoned from oblivion 
to sit as teachers to him who cast them all into the 
darkest shade.? This is not the way we reason 
about other matters. Plots, it is true, were then 
common property. No rule of courtesy forbade the 
use by one writer, or many, of the same plot or theme 
employed by other authors. Collaboration was 
common enough ; but, when we are shown any 
other tragedy approaching Shakespeare's, we may 
concede the point that he needed a teacher to coach 
him in tragedy-making at twenty-five, or even at 
twenty-one, years of age. 



124 "^^^ PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Curiously enough, out of all the swarm of play- 
writers of his era, Shakespeare is not only the great- 
est tragedian, but the only dramatist whose tragedies 
hold the English stage with an unceasing, never- 
fatiguing interest. We find sweet and noble poetry, 
powerful situations and other merits enshrined in the 
forgotten dramas of others, but they remain now 
merely as stately monuments. Occasionally some 
tragedy by another is revived for the personal behoof 
of a "Star," who thinks it fitted to his personal qual- 
ities, but it soon passes beneath the horizon, and 
only Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth remain, 
shining on continually, like the constellations that 
cluster around the Polar Star. 

Two bands of destructives are at work on Shake- 
speare. I trust they will not deem me discourteous, 
for I respect their motives, when I style them literary 
wreckers. One would transfer his entire literary 
estate in the lump to the rich heritage of the late 
Lord Bacon ; the other is sedulously striving to dis- 
tribute his dramatic effects and fame among the 
poverty-stricken ghosts of his contemporaries. In his 
own day, and for nearly two hundred years there- 
after, nobody else was even hinted at as having so 
much as dipped his finger into Hamlet. But a pedant 
dropped an ovtim of alien authorship, and it hatched to 
a bee in his bonnet ; and now a swarm that have sucked 
the honey of Shakespeare's flowers are for hiving it in 
other men's waxen cells. One play they give, on the 
strength of the internal evidences, to some unknown 
or forgotten writer ; another, to some other ; until, 
in this parting of his vestments, the great dramatist 



AND OrilER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 125 

is left in rags and almost naked. What we need is 
some honest Shakespearian who will take the time, 
toil and trouble to wipe out the baseless fabric of 
these " internal evidences " that evince nothing. 

It will scarcely be denied that somebody wrote 
Hamlet as early as 1589, or earlier. Elze adduces 
as a bit of circumstantial evidence for a much earlier 
production of the play, and its Shakespearian author- 
ship, the following facts : first, that Euphuism is 
ridiculed in the scenes with Osric and with the 
Gravedigger. He tells us that, in the scene with 
the latter, Hamlet alludes to the "three years " since 
the "age has grown so picked." Lyly's Euphues 
was published in 1581 — possibly in 1579; so that 
1585 would approximate the term for it to become 
the vogue. And he ingeniously concludes that this 
marks the birth of the play. Again, in 1585, Shake- 
speare's son Hamnet was born, and within a year 
Shakespeare is believed to have left Stratford and 
sought his fortunes in London, at the age of twenty- 
two. Elze pointedly adds, "Is it not readily con- 
ceivable that at the very beginning of his career he 
should have chosen a subject for his pen which bore 
the same name as his beloved boy, and that he should 
have recurred to it afterwards with undisguised pref- 
erence ? Hamnet died in 1596; and this blow must 
have fallen most heavily on the father, may possibly 
have led him to take up once more this spiritual 
child of the same name. Who can estimate the 
effect which grief for his only son may not have had 
in producing that deep-seated melancholy and dis- 
taste for the vanity of the world which have found in 



126 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

this tragedy their immortal expression ? This view 
is emphasized by the philosophical and passionate 
speculation of Hamlet, in the second or complete 
play, but not in the earlier draft of it." Hamlet, or 
Hamnet, was a not uncommon forename in that day 
and in the vicinity of Stratford, and Hamnet is also 
found as a surname thereabouts. 

The earliest allusion to Hamlet is by Nash in an 
Epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, printed in 
1589, and possibly in 1587, as there is some ground 
for believing, and reads as follows : "It is a com- 
mon practice now a dales amongst a sort of shifting 
companions, that runne through every arte and 
thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint where- 
to they were borne, and busie themselves with the 
indevours of arte, that could scarcelie latinize their 
necke-verse if they should have neede ; yet English 
Seneca read by candlelight yeeldes manie good sen- 
tences, as ' Blould as a beggar,' and so forth ; and 
if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will 
afford you whole Hamlets, I should say Handfulls, 
of tragical speaches. " 

Fleay, a recent writer of great industry, research 
and ingenuity, asserts that Simpson had demon- 
strated that this only refers to Shakespeare as an 
actor, and hence that this passage has no reference 
to his authorship of Hamlet. To me it seems that 
"to latinize their neck verse," i.e., to put into Latin 
a verse from the Psalms so as to give them "benefit 
of the clergy," and by this text save their necks from 
the gallows, was rather the function of a writer than 
of a play-actor, who has no need of Latin now, and 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 127 

had none then ; and the reading of an English, or 
translated, Seneca, for quotation, paraphrase, or plag- 
iary, was in like manner work for the closet and not 
for the stage. Moreover, it is well-nigh certain that 
Shakespeare never played leading parts, or won 
much distinction as an actor, and that he had ac- 
quired considerable means M'ithin four years after he 
arrived in London. He could not have made much 
money as an actor, hence we must infer that it was 
as a writer, and shareholder in his company. But, 
whoever the author may be, the quotation from 
Nash shows that there was a play of Hamlet, written 
by somebody who is styled a ' Noverint,' as early as 
1589, at least. We shall discuss later whether this 
Noverint was Shakespeare, but it may be said here 
that Lord Campbell's small book on " Shakespeare's 
Legal Acquirements," leaves little doubt that he was 
in early life a Noverint, or attorney's clerk. 

A Boston gentleman, Mr. Franklin Fisk Heard, has 
also produced an agreeable and well-considered little 
book on "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," which fortifies 
this view. 

But these references, as allusions to Shakespeare, 
received confirmation some years later, 1592, in the 
slurs of Greene, who had grown more and more 
embittered against this "Johannes Factotum," "this 
Shakescene "; aversatilejack-of-all-trades, who wrote, 
doubtless, in many manners, tragedy, comedy, his- 
tory, and likewise acted in his own dramas, and who 
had on hand a poem, "Venus and Adonis", that 
won for him the patronage of the young Maecenas 
of Southampton. 



1 2 8 THE PROTO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

This wretched Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit, 
published in 1592, uses language, which cannot refer 
to any other than Shakespeare, as the play upon 
his name evinces, as well as the reference to a line 
in Henry VI, Part 3, "O tiger's heart, wrapt in a 
woman's hide." He says, 
"An upstart crow beautified * with our feathers 

that, with his 
' Tiger's heart, wrapt in a player's hide '," 
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank 
verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute 
Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only 
Shakescene in a country, etc." Stress has been laid 
upon the fact that Greene assails him here as 'a. 
player ' : but, if such be the fact, still player and 
playwright were almost synonyms at that day, so 
the distinction goes for nothing ; and the language 
applies as well to the one as the other. 

Chettle, in his Kind Hart's Dream, 1592, thus apol- 
ogizes for, or repudiates, the foregoing : 

"About three months since died Mr. Robert 
Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers' 
hands, among others his Groatsworth of Wit, in 
which a letter written to divers playwriters is 
offensively by one or two of them taken : and 
because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they 
wilfully forge in their conceits a living author ; and 
after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but it must 
needs light on me .... With neither of them that 
take offense was I acquainted, and with one of them 

* "Beautified is a vile phrase." Was this introduced in reply 
to Greene? Hamlet, Clarendon. Act 2, S. 2, v. III. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 129 

(Marlowe?) I care not if I never be. The other 
(Shakespeare ? ) whom at that time I did not so much 
spare as since I wish I had .... that I did not I 
am as sorry as if the original fault had been my 
fault ; because myself have seen his demeanor no 
less civil than he excellent in the quality he pro- 
fesses. Besides, divers of worship have reported his 
uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty ; 
and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his 
art ... . I protest it was all Greene's, and not 
mine nor Master Nash's, as some have unjustly 
affirmed." 

The significance of these attacks. by the envious 
and dissolute Nash, and the gifted, but profligate, 
Greene, will be apparent, when we remember that 
they belonged to a rival band of dramatic authors, 
and attributed their literary failures to the malign 
influence of the company of players in which 
Shakespeare had become the most important writer. 
We know from Henslow's Diary (p. 8) that Hamlet 
continued to hold the stage, and was acted June 
9th, 1594, by a company of players, to which Shake- 
speare belonged. Lodge, in 1596, refers to it (p. 9), 
when he mentioned, "Ye ghost which cried so 
miserally (sic) at ye theator, like an oisterwife, 
Hamlet, Revenge!" 

Permit me now to call your attention to the follow- 
ing points. The First Hamlet was played in or 
before 1589 ; probably two or three years earlier. In 
1589, it was ascribed to a Noverint, or attorney's 
clerk. Competent persons, learned in the law, dis- 
cover in the undoubted work of Shakespeare 

9 



130 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

evidences, very weighty if not entirely conclusive, 
that he was well equipped with legal phraseology, 
full of it, and in his earliest writings quite saturated 
with it. The allusions of his rivals a little later 
seem to fix upon him a connection with this play of 
Hamlet, so that, in default of a claimant even to 
this nom de plume of Noverint, we must leave the 
holder in possession. All the positive evidence is 
in favor of Shakespeare's authorship : popular opin- 
ion, competent contemporaneous witnesses, his own 
imquestioned ownership, a ^■wasz-copyright, the ad- 
missions of his enemies, and the claims of his friends, 
colleagues and posthumous publishers. The attempt 
to parcel out the plays of Shakespeare among the 
dramatists of his day is a failure, because there is 
no testimony to lead to such a conclusion. The 
dividers of the spoil cannot agree among themselves 
as to who is entitled to share in it, and the beggars 
they would clothe in the purple betray their person- 
ality in every phase of their mock royalty. The 
only evidence cited against this view is of that filmy 
and esoteric character which depends on the intui- 
tions of critics as to style, or on its conformity to cer- 
tain arbitrary rules of another school, which are con- 
tinually found at fault and misleading. More or less 
value may be attached to Elze's opinions on the 
coincidence in* names and dates of the birth and 
death of Shakespeare's son, with the inception and 
revision of this tragedy. The omission from Meres' 
list could not be passed over, because so much has 
been made of it by diligent commentators, but when 



AND OTffER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 131 

examined without prejudice, it seems too slender a 
thread to hang a theory on. 

It may, in view of all the facts, be affirmed that all 
the positive and extrinsic evidence is in favor of Shake- 
speare's authorship of the original Hamlet, while the 
belief that anybody else wrote it, or had any special 
share in, or claim to, its production, rests upon mere 
hypothesis. To accept it, we must admit that Shake- 
speare was not only phenomenal, but abnormal, and 
by some miracle was suddenly transformed from a 
reprobate call-boy to the imperial ruler of thought 
and imagination. I do not deny that as extraordi- 
nary instances maybe produced of the rise of men as 
of their reverses, often independent of merit, where 
opportunity has played henchman to ability, and 
greatness has been thrust upon fortune's favorites. 
But the empire of the mind, unlike success in tem- 
poral matters, is above these caprices. It must with- 
stand and survive every assault that can be made, 
and hence must rest upon reality. Shakespeare's 
supremacy remains, because what he has said was 
better said, and better, than other men's utterances. 

The certitude of Shakespeare's authorship of Ham- 
let, ah ovo, rests chiefly, after all, in default of dis- 
proof, on his undisputed title for so long a time and 
on the transcendent ability of the man. And if this 
discussion has no other value it would seem not 
fruitless, if it brings home to us the great fact of the 
immense difference in the natural endowments of 
men — a fact which all the radical and levelling- in- 
fluences of the age are tending to disparage or deny. 
It is a difference measured by the abyss betwixt im- 



132 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET 



becility and genius. It has been the fashion of late 
to confound genius with plodding industry ; as it was 
formerly, with a spasmodic and eccentric vivacity of 
fancy. Both conceptions are entirely erroneous. 
Genius belongs to him who has been lifted up by 
nature, and is the gift which, because of this higher 
point of view, confers a wider horizon, a clearer 
vision, and a deeper insight. Energy is a crucial test 
of genius, as well as its motive power. No endow- 
ments merit the name, or mean the thing, unless they 
are accompanied by an energy so irresistible that it 
will not accept denial or defeat in its inquiry and 
effort for loftier altitudes of life and thought. Energy 
is an essential constituent of genius ; is its very sym- 
bol. On the other hand, mere nervous irritability of 
intellect, play of fancy, and gushes of eloquence are 
but the fragments of imagination and reason, and 
have to be brought into organic unity, and held in 
well ordered process, in order to be classed with the 
phenomena of genius even. Sanity, like energy, is a 
final test of genius. Shakespeare's possession of the 
sanity and energy of genius establishes the verity of 
his endowments. 

The arguments that would deny to Shakespeare 
the authorship of the First Hamlet and his other 
early plays depend upon the theory of mediocrity as 
a universal fact. All that is required to give assur- 
ance that he could take a story as he found it, inform 
it with his own personality and make of it an immor- 
tal play, is to pre-suppose that he had this gift of 
genius as I have described it. 

That this young man from his first appearance in 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS, i-^^^^ 

London exhibited all the criteria of genius is evident 
from the httle we know of his life. Those who only- 
looked to the ease with which he wrote and to the 
outv/ard form of his plays, but not to the inner light 
that fills them, spoke of him as an untutored child of 
nature. Milton, trained in all the knowledge of the 
schools, says, 

"Sweetest Shakespfeare, Fancy's child. 
Warbled his native woodnotes wild," 
and this has been the common view of him. But he 
was more than this. 

His whole career is one of the noblest testimonies 
on record to the sanity of genius. From the first he 
set himself to master that organ of expression, lan- 
guage, which was to utter his tuneful thought, be it 
in sonnet, poem or play. His habits and life were 
so governed as to enable him to achieve that inde- 
pendence which should place him above "the 
oppressor's wrong, the proudjman's contumely." He 
evinced an immense ability to labor, and an irresist- 
ible impulse for literary creation — the embodiment of 
thought. His toil was upward; aspiration winged 
his sandals, and imagination grew the pinions that 
lifted him above his peers and his successors. We 
know that Shakespeare wrote the last Hamlet, we 
are sure that he wrote the second, and who but he 
could have written the very first Hamlet ? 



134 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HAMLET. 

" As this temple waxes, 
The inward service of the mind and soul 
Grows wide withal " Hamlet, I. 3. 

In the last lecture I endeavored to show "Who 
wrote Hamlet," and offered some proofs that not 
only the last, or completed, Hamlet, was Shake- 
speare's, but that the very earliest, or hypothetical, 
Hamlet, also originated with him. I shall now pro- 
ceed to fortify this view by additional arguments 
showing the titter improbability that it was the pro- 
duction of any of his contemporaries, together with 
some further proofs that Shakespeare himself wrote 
it. My purpose is then to exhibit the manner in 
which it was developed from a rough sketch to the 
world-renowned tragedy, together with the subtle 
influences which perhaps called up from the poet's 
heart its wonderful soliloquies. 

We are too prone to overlook the fact that Shake- 
speare was not only the greatest dramatist of his own, 
or any other age, but that he was the founder and 
creator of the romantic drama as we have it. Nearly 
all the greater dramatists of that period were the suc- 
cessors of Shakespeare, and, indeed, his disciples. 
The exception was the group that composed the so- 
called "University wits," who have been supposed 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 135 

to constitute a rival school of the prophets : Peele, 
Greene, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, to whom may- 
be added, Lyly and Kyd. But Fleay throws great 
doubt upon their alleged association, if he does not 
disprove it, and makes a plausible showing for friend- 
ship and collaboration between Marlowe and Shake- 
speare. 

In view of Shakespeare's wonderfully genial nature, 
and his victory over the prejudices of all who came 
into actual contact with him, it seems not improbable 
that this surmise of Fleay may have a basis of solid 
fact. Too much weight, perhaps, should not be laid, 
however, upon his generous allusion in "As You 
Like It " to Marlowe, after his wretched and untimely 
end : 

" Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might : 
'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight.' " 

the second line being quoted from Marlowe's Hero 
and Leander. 

Flashes of wit, bursts of eloquence, flights of poetry 
and erratic glimpses of dramatic truth abound in the 
writings of the brilliant band of Bohemians just 
named ; but none of their plays still hold the stage, 
and to but one of them can be accorded eminent 
genius. Christopher Marlowe, in his brief and ill-regu- 
lated career, evinced powers, which, if matured and 
chastened, might have added a star of the first mag- 
nitude to English Literature ; but still he is as much 
inferior to Shakspeare as he is superior to the boon 
companions, who, with their phosphorescence, 
lighted him the way to dusty death. It is generally 
assumed that Shakespeare is indebted to Marlowe, or 



136 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

others of this crew of rival writers, or to certain (or 
uncertain) other obscure and unknown playwrights, 
who are conjectured to have prepared the way for 
the great dramatist, by providing him with the rough 
drafts of his dramas, while he merely adapted such 
outline plays to the stage. An ingenious guess as 
to such an origin, say of the First Hamlet, is assumed 
as a basis of argument ; and from this postulate is 
drawn a series of inferences, which are passed on as 
sober statements, and are finally handed down as 
historic facts. The evidence for such a concatena- 
tion is entirely hypothetical, drawn from the inner con- 
sciousness of commentators, and to me seems as base- 
less and apocryphal as the Bacon-myth matter, (or 
no matter), and fit only for dismissal to limbo. These 
phantom dramatists, conjured from oblivion, never 
appear in any better light than as shadows of the 
coming poet. The oldest of the so-called University 
group, Lyly, was only about ten years the senior of 
Shakespeare ; and, according to Fleay, only two of 
Lyly's and one ofPeele's plays were published before 
Shakespeare's arrival in London, and most of the 
work of the entire group was done between that date 
and 1594, when Shakespeare had already become 
rich and famous. Marlowe's plays, too, were writ- 
ten about the same time with Shakespeare's earlier 
efforts ; so that Shakespeare's dramatic competitors 
were more strictly his contemporaries than his prede- 
cessors. 

On one ground or another, often very slight, it is 
assumed that these literary adventurers all began to 
produce plays as soon as they came to London, and 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 137 

exhausted themselves by 1592 or 1593; but that 
Shakespeare, not only the greatest, but the most suc- 
cessful, of them all, was sterile until they had finished 
their careers, when he burst into a sudden fecundity, 
and in about ten or twelve years produced his galaxy 
of dramas. The whole theory is, to my mind, irra- 
'tional and preposterous. Why should Shakespeare 
alone be assumed to have been idle, or incompetent, 
because the barren records of the time do not furnish 
specifically the dates of his productions, when this is 
true of all the rest of the dramatists of that period. 

Marlowe, the greatest of his competitors, was only 
three months older than Shakespeare, and came to 
London about the same time as Shakespeare, or after 
him. Very little is known of him, and that little, 
sadly enough, is the story of neglected opportunities, 
wasted gifts and a blasted life ; nevertheless, he has 
been styled, "The Father of English dramatic 
poetry." Though the language is too strong, yet it 
may be fairly conceded that in his hands blank verse 
first acquired a dignity and power that gave a new 
meaning to the language of the drama. Symonds 
assigns the production of his first tragedy, " Tambur- 
laine," to 1587, when he was but twenty-three years 
of age ; and Bullen, in his Life of Marlowe, con- 
cluded that Tamburlaine "had been presented on the 
stage in, or before, 1588, probably 1587." Why, 
apriori, could not Shakespeare have written the First 
Hamlet at twenty-three, as well as Marlowe, Tam- 
burlaine ? There is not more proof that Marlowe 
wrote Tamburlaine than that Shakespeare wrote the 
first Hamlet ; indeed, Malone inferred, on poor data 



138 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

it is true, that Tamburlaine was written by Nash. I 
am not inclined to give more than due weight to tra- 
dition, but uncontradicted contemporary opinion is 
certainly of more value than paradoxical doubts of 
the same, resting often on shadowy surmises. Why 
should not Marlowe's Tamburlaine have been written 
by Marlowe, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, 
and Shakespeare's Hamlet by Shakespeare.-* The 
popular voice and the belief of intimate friends and 
hostile critics took it for granted in their own day 
and generation, and we have no other evidence so 
good. It is no disparagement to Shakespeare to say 
that Marlowe was of a more precocious genius, 
that he came to London better prepared by educa- 
tion for a successful career, and that his reputation was 
won earlier. But to treat Shakespeare as a scholar, 
follower, or imitator, of Marlowe, is fanciful. They 
were contemporaries, and, starting together in the 
flight for fame, rose with well-matched strength till 
Marlowe fell, while Shakespeare's transcendent pin- 
ion mounted and bore him on to the empyrean. 

The lives of all these men are quite as obscure as 
Shakespeare's early history. We may agree with 
Halliwell who says, (Outlines, 8th ed. Vol. i, p. 95), 
"There is not, indeed, a single particle of evidence 
respecting his career during the next five years, that 
is to say, from the Lambert negotiation in 1587, un- 
til he is discovered as a rising actor and dramatist in 
1592 :" and the same may be said of his rivals, 
but this only proves of how little personal impor- 
tance a playwriter was esteemed at that day. Hal- 
liwell regards this as the "chief period in Shake- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



139 



speare's literary education, as undoubtedly it was ; 
but it does not follow that it had not been built upon 
a good foundation, or that it was, during this time, 
unproductive. If intrinsic proof has any value, 
Shakespeare's early writings, as well as his later, 
evince that, however little he may have had in 
youth of the refinements of culture, he had gone 
through 'the grind,' and had been put solid on 
the corner stone of schoolboy Latin, although he never 
acquired the somewhat unwieldy learning of Ben 
Jonson and the Universities. But then all the winds 
of heaven and the angels who make up the ministry 
of nature were ushers in the school he went to, so 
that he learned the secrets that make a seer. 

Greene, Peele, Nash and Marlowe all died young 
and disreputably, but they left literary remains that 
have helped a later inspiration in literature. But 
contemporary opinion, foreshadowing the verdict of 
history, is best seen in Ben Jonson's verse. After 
the death of all these poets, he hesitates not to place 
Shakespeare first of them all : 

' ' All tell how far thou didst our Lily out shine, 
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line." 

While he might find in contemporary writers the 
stimulus of rivalry, the greatest debt Shakespeare 
owed them was in the instances they afforded his 
true artistic instinct and practical mind of what to 
avoid. Doubtless, so far, they were most valuable 
teachers ; but, at all events, they were scarcely 
more to him than Jane Porter to Scott, or Miss Bur- 
ney and Fielding to Thackeray and George Eliot — 
precursors of the dawn. 



I40 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

What are the facts? In 1589, this young man of 
21, unable to resist the impulse of genius that called 
him to a literary career, left his native Stratford for 
London. The leading actor then in London, Burbage, 
was a Warwickshire man ; and Greene, also a lead- 
ing member of the Lord Chamberlain s Players, to 
which he probably attached himself, was from Strat- 
ford itself. It has been not unreasonably inferred 
that it was under the patronage of these able men — 
able in their vocation — that the young adventurer 
entered on his theatrical career. Fleay says he wrote 
Venus and Adonis in 1588, though it was not pub- 
lished until 1593 ; but, in the absence of any proof in 
the matter, it is not improbable that he brought 
the poem to London in his pocket, as Sam Johnson 
long afterwards brought his Irene, with such differ- 
ent (and indifferent) success. It is almost certain 
that in the next year he was one of a company of 
players, Lord Strange's, as Fleay concludes, or, as 
been commonly held, the Lord Chamberlain's, to 
which he remained attached for a quarter of a cen- 
tury. Three years afterward he was a shareholder 
in the Globe Company, and later became one of the 
leading members. We have seen that a play called 
Hamlet was probably acted in 1586, or 1587, almost 
certainly in 1588, certainly in 1589. We know 
that the reputed author proved eventually to be a 
man of extraordinary genius, of a great facility 
and fecundity in dramatic production, and that his 
rise in his profession was phenomenally rapid. 
While this may have been in some measure due to 
the charm of his manner and his sterling character. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 141 

yet his success was primarily and principally profes- 
sional. He built his reputation and won his position 
on the solid foundation of merit in the line of his 
legitimate work — poetry and the drama. Venus and 
Adonis, which won the admiration of the Court and lit- 
erary guild from the first, early evinced what a fount- 
ain of poesy he possessed ; and his plays soon gave 
him an importance in that branch of the art also. He 
is said to have been a fair actor in secondary parts, 
but his usefulness hi his company was as the author 
of plays that won for it wealth, public favor and the 
first place in the dramatic art. When we regard the 
metrical and artistic finish of Venus and Adonis, it is 
incredible that any argument should be based upon 
the insufficiency of Shakespeare in merely technical 
skill to accomplish any rhetorical feat at that period. 

Despite the objections offered to Shakespeare's 
ability to write "the rough sketch of Hamlet in 1586, 
at, say, twenty-two years of age, there is nothing in 
it unprecedented in literature or other walks of life. 
Pope, who commenced his literary career at sixteen, 
and published his exquisite Rape of the Lock at 
twenty-three, might be cited as far more precocious. 
The wretched, but gifted, Chatterton finished his 
career by suicide at eighteen. Milton wrote his 
magnificent Hymn to the Nativity as a college 
exercise at twenty-one. Burns, Shelley, Byron, Keats, 
all wrote well at about the same age. 

Gerald Griffin had sketched his tragedy of Gisippus 
when he was fourteen and finished' it at eighteen, 
when the great actor Macready thought it worthy 



142 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

his impersonation ; and this was not his only work 
completed at that age. 

And in Shakespeare's own day, his contemporary, 
Marlowe, showed a like premature genius ; while 
Ben Jonson's first and most successful dramatic work 
is assigned to his twenty-third year. It really seems 
strange that any weight should have been attached 
to this argument. The difficulty at twenty-one, or 
two, is not in producing a work of the imagination, 
but in speculative thought, artistic finish and practical 
dramatic workmanship, in which the earlier Hamlet 
may well have been deficient. A mere play was not 
then thought M'orthy the best efforts of an author, 
and Hamlet, at first, was probably, in some sort, "a 
pot boiler. " It may be conceded that neither Shake- 
speare, nor any other man, could have written Ham- 
let, as we now have it, at such an early age, but we 
know also that such was not its earliest form, or 
indeed its form at all, until twelve or fourteen, perhaps 
sixteen, years later, when life had taught him its les- 
sons. 

There is really no a priori reason why a man of 
high order of dramatic genius might not have framed 
the plot and written an acting play of Hamlet at the 
age of twenty-two years. But some critics assume 
that in Shakespeare's case there were personal reasons 
why he could not then, or ever, have written this, or, 
indeed, any, of his plays. It is very difficult to argue 
with gentlemen of this persuasion, as they all feel 
that they hold a brief — have a cause to maintain. As 
a characteristic specimen of this sort of estimate of 
the poet, I give here what Mr. Wm. Henry Smith, in a 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



143 



took entitled, "Bacon and Shakespeare" (Chapter 
2nd), calls, "A Brief History of Shakespeare." 

" William Shakespeare's is, indeed, a negative 
history. 

Of his life all that we positively know is the period 
of his death. 

We do not know when he was born, nor when, 
nor where, he was educated. 

We do not know when, nor where, he was married, 
nor when he came to London. 

We do not know when, where, or in what order, 
his plays were written, or performed; nor when he 
left London. 

He died April 23rd, 16 16." 

That is one way of putting it ; it iS, indeed, about 
the sum of the Bacon-Myth argument ; and is, in 
fine, the reduciio ad ahsurdum of the whole theory of 
Shakespeare's nonentity, as based upon negative evi- 
dence. And yet if Mr. Smith had been as diligent to 
find out all that could be known of Shakespeare as 
he was not to find anything, he might have learned 
a good many facts, such as they are. Halliwell has 
shown how much may be known about him through 
honest investigation. If we do not know the day of 
his birth, we have the record of his christening, which 
was then done a few days after, and was considered 
more essential. We do not know when, nor where, 
he was educated, but we do know that he entered 
life armed cap-a-pie, able at all points to vanquish, 
" those twin gaolers of the daring heart, low birth 
and iron fortune." 

The tradition, whatever that is worth, was that 



144 "^^^ PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Shakespeare was a lawyer's clerk ; and Malone, who 
first rejected the idea, on fuller examination of the 
internal evidence, concluded that such was the case. 
Lord Campbell's citations sustain this view in his 
monograph, "Legal Acquirements of Shakespeare," 
though his conclusions are cautiously stated. Lord 
Campbell adduces a great deal of internal evidence 
from Shakespeare's plays to prove his familiar knowl- 
edge of the law, the fair inference being that he was 
a "Noverint", so-called, an attorney's clerk, before 
he left Stratford for London, The Baconians attempt 
to show that the author of his plays was a wonderful 
lawyer, and hence was not Shakespeare ; but, though 
his law knowledge seems sound and sure, many 
attorney's clerks have had more learning and more 
law. 

The evidence summed up by Lord Campbell, Mr- 
Cartwright and Mr. Heard is, to my mind, as con- 
vincing as any such internal evidence can be that 
Shakespeare was an attorney's clerk, and a good 
one, in his youth, which was a better education than 
Dickens had — and yet Lord Macaulay did not write 
David Copperfield ! 

Robert Cartwright, in "The Footsteps of Shake- 
speare ", attempts to prove that he studied law, after 
he came to London, a most improbable theory. But, 
in doing so, his quotations show Shakespeare's famil- 
iarity with law at the time when he wrote Hamlet, 
and his saturation with legal phrase and thought, 
that kept coming to the surface. Now, Cartwright 
assumes that Pericles, Titus Andronicus and the Two 
Gentlemen of Verona were Shakespeare's first plays, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 145 

and believes that Hamlet was certainly in existence 
ni 1589, and was most probably written in 1588. 
The first three plays have few legal indicia, Hamlet 
a g-reat many ; hence he infers that Shakespeare 
studied law between the production of that first batch 
and Hamlet. Doubt has been thrown on Shake- 
speare's authorship of Pericles and Titus Andronicus ; 
and the Two Gentlemen of Verona was probably a 
collaboration in which he was the junior, though 
more gifted, partner. If these views are correct, or 
if his chronology be wrong and Hamlet was written 
first, Cartwright's argument goes for nothing in favor 
of the time when he thinks Shakespeare studied law, 
but for much as to what he knew about it, and as to 
the close connection between Hamlet and his legal 
studies. Fresh from his attorney's work at Stratford, 
when he tried his prentice hand on Hamlet, he then 
naturally spoke in its terminology. As his experience 
widened and his vocabulary enlarged, this peculiarity 
would be less apparent ; and, though it might crop 
out, it would not be obtruded. The display of some- 
what cheap classical learning in the Gonzago Play 
and elsewhere in Hamlet evinces freshness, rather 
'than maturity, in the author, and probably belonged 
to the first draft of the play. The most valid inference 
from the legal phraseology that appears so often in 
Hamlet is that this play was, in some- form, one of 
his earliest productions, if not his very earliest essay 
in the dramatic art. Is the thought altogether irra- 
tional that, because it was his first-boni, it retained 
such a hold on his imagination and afTection, and 

10 



146 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

won for itself the birthright, and became the heir of 
his genius ? 

Recurring to Mr. Smith's brief and contemptuous 
"Biography of Shakespeare," we can claim we do 
know when, and where, and whom, he married, and 
a good deal of such stuff as registers, etc., are made 
of, about his parents and ancestors and children, and 
about his mortgages and deeds and his last will. 
We do not know all about when, where, or in what 
order, his plays were performed ; but we know quite 
as much of all these and other personal details, 
as we know concerning a dozen or more of the 
other leading dramatists of the age. What do we 
know of any of them .? Who then cared for these 
players and writers ? If there was anything evil, or 
equivocal, in their lives and conduct, be sure that, in 
the fierce light of religious fanaticism and the bur- 
rowing of bookworms, it has a far better chance to 
escape oblivion than their better deeds. 

•'The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones ; " 

and this is especially true of the Elizabethan drama- 
tists. 

In Shakespeare's time, dramatic authors were of 
small consideration, and, when mentioned, it is the 
least creditable side of their lives which is turned up 
to gratify public curiosity ; they are to be remembered, 
it appears, by their follies, their vices and their ec- 
centricities only. Hartley Coleridge, in his Life of 
Massinger, truly says : 

"The lives of our great dramatists, 'of the great 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



H7 



race,' furnish few materials for drama. They are 
provokingly barren of incident. They present neither 
complicated plots, nor strikinj^ situations, nor well- 
contrasted characters. In their own age they were 
overlooked as too familiar — in the next, cast aside as 
unfashionable." 

Dwelling on the immense research that has been 
brought to bear upon all that concerns those literary 
giants, he continues: "It is very Well that so few 
reputations have suffered by the scrutiny ; for, had 
the great dramatists been conspicuous for either vice 
or folly, they would not have shared the fate of the 
heroes before Agamemnon. They lived in an age of 
personality. The great eye of the world was not 
then, any more than now, so intent on things and 
principles, as not to have a corner for the infirmities 
of individuals." — - 

"The success or poverty of a dramatist might 
excite no more sensation than similar vicissitudes in 
the fortunes of a strolling player, or any other ' unfor- 
tunate ' living from hand to mouth. Yet less were 
simple respectability and moderate prosperity calcu- 
lated for public notice." 

The more orderly and uneventful the lives of any 
of these players, or dramatists, the more likely were 
they to escape the denunciation of Puritanic play- 
haters, or the still more fatal admiration of the disso- 
lute reprobates who hung around the purlieus of the 
theatres. Shakespeare was, therefore, fortunate in 
coming down to us pictured by the hands of the 
titanic geniuses who knew him best. As painted 
by Ben Jonson, the very chief of the literary guild, 



1 4 8 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T. 

he was a man of worth, gentle and genial, who 
sought not fame, but found her nestling at his feet. 
His good business habits are matters of record, and 
are best evinced in the fortune he acquired. He 
retired from a highly successful career in the heydey 
of his triumphs, at forty six-years of age, to a quiet 
rural life ; and this is the best answer to those who 
stigmatize him as greedy and dissolute. Most of his 
contemporaries we know only through their misfor- 
tunes. All that is certainly known of Marlowe, 
Greene, Peele, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Ford 
and the rest, even including Ben Jonson, could be 
printed in a few pages. So that it were strange if 
Shakespeare's life could not be put into a nutshell. Of 
the man Shakespeare, we may know but little, if we 
exclude vague rumor, unverified and conflicting tra- 
dition, the gossip of scandal-mongers, and unwar- 
rantable inference. But with his position as an 
author it is different. We must draw a distinction 
between the personal and the literar/ career of 
writers of that age, or of any age. How much, even 
in this era of the printing-press, does anybody really 
know of our great writers .? True, there are reposi- 
tories in biographical dictionaries, magazine articles, 
etc., from which we can disinter more or less of fact 
and fiction about them. Blot these out, and write 
down what you really know about Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Anybody. How much is it ? What we do really 
know is what concerns us, their literary value. And, 
of Shakespeare, we can learn from his contempo- 
raries his place in their esteem as well as if he lived 
to-day. Ben Jonson sounds no uncertain note in his 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



149 



praise. Harsh, rugged, critical, to others — critical 
even to Shakespeare — he loved the man, "only this 
side of idolatry." 

Meres tells us, "The sweet witty soul of Ovid 
lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare." 
And Weever, still earlier in 1596, also calls him 
"honey-tongued," and of his works tells us, "Some 
heaven-born goddess said to be their mother." A 
Mournful Ditty," on the Queen's death in 1603, calls 
him "brave Shakespeare;" and the lofty Sir John 
Davies, in 1607, addresses some verses, "To our 
English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare ; " 

"Some say, good Will, which I in sport do sing, 
Had'st thou not played some kingly parts in sport, 
Thou had'st l^een a companion for a king, 
And been a king among the meaner sort. 
Some others rail ; but rail as they think fit, 
Thou hast no railing, but a reigning wit; 
And honestly thou sowest which they do reap, 
So to increase their stock which they do keep." 

Which verses may be commended to "some 
others," who, in this our own day, "rail," as if this 
man's existence had been a personal grievance to 
them. In his own day he was reviled, but reviled 
not again, and that wit, or wisdom, of his, which 
was acknowledged as regnant, when he was yet but 
little over two score years of age, by one of the lead-- 
iiig writers of the age, reigneth still, and still will 
reign. 

Such, at least as I conceive the facts, were the man 
and the situation, which may be summed up as fol- 
lovv's : the son of a village tradesman — scion of a 



I50 



THE PROTOTYPF. OF HAMLET. 



family of honest repute, but of decaying fortunes — 
growing uj^ amid the influences of rural England, 
in one of its manliest and most brilliant epochs, 
when it burgeoned and burst into most glorious 
blossom, found himself tin the threshold of life. 
While yet a callow youth, unchecked passions and 
the recklessness of the times had burdened him with 
a family. Instead of yielding to an almost foregone 
fate, he looked up. His mighty gifts, revelations of 
genius, far stretching vistas into the invisible realm 
of thought and imagination, came to his lowly home 
from nature and man and all the voices of the 
universe. But, from his whole subsequent career, it 
is evident, that with them came a resolve to adjust 
all that he was, and all that saw in those upper 
realms, to the conditions of his surroundings. He 
had the mighty creative faculty, which seems not to 
have been denied in some measure to Marlowe and 
others, but with it he had also a robust moral nature 
and common-sense, and, to speed the keel, an unfail- 
ing energy ; and it is the union of these qualities that 
constitutes genius. 

Circumstances, the bent of his inclination, and 
that insight which was self-revealing, led him to the 
play house. He obeyed the call of destiny. He 
became an actor, and thus got his foot into the 
stirrup. Not long was it before he was able to 
mount Pegasus. In the dreams of his youth, when, 
we can believe without shame, a wayward exuber- 
ance may have drawn him along with boon com- 
panions to play Robin Hood with Sir Thomas Lucy's 
deer, as an unveritied legend asserts, or even while 



AND OTHEK SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



151 



poring over the Law French of black letter tomes, 
he may have caught from nature, or the spiritual 
universe, or from the very imps of perversity in the 
crabbed texts themselves, the airs that grew into 
higher melodies of thought and became immortal 
dramas. But the Noverint has become a play actor, 
a hard life, though, at the Elizabethan Court, one with 
all the inspiration that comes from an atmosphere 
surcharged with electricity. Plays are needed by his 
Company ; drunken, reprobate Greene, who sells his 
plays twice over to rival theatres, cannot be trusted 
to write them; Burbage, the leading 'star' of the 
hour, must have a tragedy. What more likely than 
that this ambitious tyro should write a play, in imita- 
tion of what he had seen in his native village, where 
we know that dramatic performances had been given 
while he was still a youth there, or that, following 
the lead of Lyiy, Kyd or Marlowe, he should attempt 
"a tragedy of blood '' — a " Hamlet, Revenge \ " 

This is such an opportunity as, like the Faery train, 
is only seen by them to whom the second-sight is 
given. This young man seizes it ; and, three or four 
years later, we find him iifth in the list of stock- 
holders of the Company, and already enough known 
to fame to stir the bile and bitter enmity of disap- 
pointed rivals. Henceforth his career was one of 
uninterrupted success, so that the nickname given in 
jest became a reality, and he was, in truth, "William 
the Conqueror." 

All of us know something of Shakespeare's method. 
Plot given, or taken, it may be ; then a play that men 
will sit through and knit their brows, weep with, per- 



152 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

chance, and ponder over, and come again ; in a 
word — a success. And hence we find Hamlet, which 
should be counted among his earliest plays, as has 
already been shown, in conception so little dramatic 
as to its final outcome, if the dramatic consists in 
action merely, and yet so striking in its isolated situa- 
tions, and with so self-determined a movement in its 
essential or intrinsic action. Little care did the bold 
pioneer in romantic drama take for unities, conven- 
tionalities, or the consistency of out ward things. Ana- 
chronisms, solecisms, historical inaccuracies that 
would have shocked Baron Verulam, abound in him, 
but they did not confound him. But then he put men 
and women, not puppets, upon the stage ; and, most 
of all, he put something of himself, and of the Divine 
Spirit that moved him, into his characters ; and so 
they live. He was limited by stage requirements 
needed to render his tragedy a success as an acting 
play ; but, to these, his artistic intuitions and expe- 
rience on the stage enabled him readily to conform. 
And beyond this he had the impulse and the con- 
straint of genius to gratify his own creative faculty and 
power of large discourse, " looking before and after." 
This was a law of his being, as Maker, Master, Wizard, 
Sovereign Elect of the Drama, and, as it would seem, 
of all literature. 

No greater damage could then be done a troop of 
players than to print their plays, and thus rob them 
of their monopoly of acting them. They were ad- 
dressed to the senses, the eye and ear, and not to 
that more subtle communion with the intelligence 
through the printed page. It was the habit of these 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS 153 

companies to take any old, or popular, story, and give 
such a version of it as suited the conditions of the 
case, the times, the audience, the abilities of the ac- 
tors, and, to a small extent, the spectacular effect. 
What this legend of Hamlet vi^as, and who was the 
prototype of the Prince of Denmark, I shall discuss 
later on. But at first it was only a cartoon that he 
sketched. It seems certain that anybody's sugges- 
tion, interpolation, or addition, if clearly an improve- 
ment to a play, would be freely accepted. Literary 
jealousies and sensibilities had small place in com- 
positions chiefly anonymous, among a co-operative 
company, where gain and joint dramatic success were 
the prime objects. This was the advantage that the 
young and obscure, but gifted, man would have. 
His utility would be readily recognized, and he 
would speedily become indispensable. 

Shakespeare, like other dramatists of his day, took 
his plots in the main as he found them. He was not 
solicitous, or too careful, as to the material on which 
he was to imprint the seal of his genius. Marble or 
sandstone, Corinthian brass or cherry stones, were 
indifferent to him. The crude, refractory stuff would 
become precious with the signature, ' W. Shakespeare. ' 
This is not to say that Shakespeare thought of the 
matter thus, or did himself justice therein, but it is to 
state a fact. He took his plots from anywhere, recast 
them to suit the exigencies of the play-house, and 
then, with the transmuting force of his genius, con- 
formed them to the eternal verities. 

Let us suppose, then, that Shakespeare made a 
sketch, as we would now term it, of this tragedy ; and 



1 5 4 THE PRO TO TYPE OF IIAMLE T, 

that in 1586 or 1587 his company put it, such as it 
was, upon the stage. Every representation of it might 
bring with it some alteration which his own dramatic 
intuitions, or the expertness of actors, would sug- 
gest, so that, at last, the play would crystallize into 
the shape in which we have it in the First Quarto, 
and in which it probably held the stage, until about 
1596, when it seems to have fallen for a time into 
obscurity. In 1586, Hamlet was to Shakespeare a 
youth of twenty ; only two years his junior, his dear 
younger brother and confidant — perhaps in some 
degree, his own image or double ; — in 1596, Hamlet 
had become a man of thirty, who had chewed the 
bitter-sweet cud of life, and who had seen, too, its 
illusions shattered. Hamlet developed by just so 
much as Shakespeare did. 

It is probable that Shakespeare thus in 1596 again 
took up this fruitage of his springtime, and, under 
social, political and personal conditions entirely dif- 
ferent from those of its original conception, elaborated 
it to the comprehensive scope of the Second Quarto, 
or Last Hamlet. This was apparently at a crisis in 
his life. 

Hamlet seems, from the profound melancholy 
which pervades its soliloquies, which, indeed, under- 
lies it, to have been written in a season of defeat to 
its author. This may have been in part some reverse 
of fortune, or threat of disaster, of the details of which 
we are not aware. But as the dissatisfaction is spir- 
itual, rather than material, it is more probable that 
this gloom resulted from the awakening of a high 
and noble spirit to a consciousness of its own defects, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



155 



limitations, and moral reverses, and from an unavail- 
ingf struggle for an outlet from the valley of the 
shadow of death. 

The pessimism in this play has been accounted 
for by the death of his only son in 1596, and the loss 
of other near and dear relations about that time. 
Political and financial events may have contributed 
to it. Self-reproach for a life vv^hich had not been 
regulated by an absolute standard of right, perhaps, 
more than both of these, bred those doubtings, ques- 
tionings, and moral defiances to a universe with the 
law and perfection of which he was not in accord. 

Mr. W. W. Story thus gracefully puts forward a 
suggestion that has occurred to others as well as 
himself 

" He is as perfectly impersonal as a mirror held 
up to nature. 

' He nor commends nor grieves. 
Pleads for itself the fact, 
As unrelenting Nature leaves 
Her every act. ' 

Yet here and there one seems to catch a personality, 
and this last citation brings one to my mind. There 
is always a certain insistence on the delight of mere 
living, and a certain horror of death, which seems to 
me to show that to hirn life was a great joy, and death 
to his active nature had a peculiar repulsion. One 
sees this constantly in Hamlet, which is, perhaps, the 
least irnpersonal of all the characters he ever drew, 
and represents a mood which comes to all imagina- 
tive natures at a certain period of life, and through 
which he was passing when he wrote this play. The 



1 5 6 THE PR O TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

sphinx riddle of humanity, and of life and death, was 
then troubling his reason and his consciousness, and 
so weighing- upon him that it gives a color to all the 
meditations of Hamlet that is doubtless completely- 
true to Hamlet dramatically, but that has a certain 
somewhat beyond the dramatical truth and of a per- 
sonal character. I cannot exactly explain why this 
is, but I cannot help feeling it." (Story's Conversa- 
tions in a Studio, vol. I. page 113). 

Though Shakespeare's only son Hamnet was the 
namesake, as well as the godson, of his early friend, 
Hamnet Sadler, and Hamlet was" the name used in 
the old story on which the play was based, still the 
coincidence has some significance, especially if we 
admit that Shakespeare made his first draft of the 
tragedy soon after the birth of his son. It seems that 
about that time this legend of Hamlet must somehow 
have fastened itself upon his imagination, and en- 
gaged his prentice hand. But the coincidence of 
Hamnet's death in 1596 with Shakespeare's revival of 
interest in his early production at that time is more 
remarkable. For some reason, as we may judge 
from internal evidences in his works, this was a crit- 
ical period, and, to some extent, a turning point, in 
his career. He took up Hamlet again with no boyish 
hand, but with the grasp and power that have made 
it a world poem. 

None can tell how much this man had built upon 
the future of his only son. It is the quality of ambi- 
tious, imaginative, altruistic, natures to go out of 
themselves in their dreams of advancement, Shake- 
speare felt that his profession and the hard conditions 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 157 

of his fate had shut him out from the full rewards of 
his genius in his own generation. All the traditions 
and prejudices of his country and time pointed to the 
establishment of his family — the founding of a house 
. — as the most legitimate and honorable aim of a man 
in his, or any, position. It is easy to recall Sir Walter 
Scott's similar fruitless dream of Abbotsford and a 
county family. This was the meaning of Shake- 
speare's thrift, his wish for wealth, his purchases of 
land, his claim to a coat of arms, his aspiration to be 
a country gentleman. But his dear boy died, and all 
was shattered. His dream was dissolved. He was 
alone, 'a barren sceptre inhisgripe', with no son to 
stand in the gate and uphold his name. Men speak 
of the bitterness of death ; but the bitterness of life ! — 
we will not speak of it. 

It is likely also that the friends at Court, on whom 
he counted, he found cold, or, in the crooked cabals 
of the time, thwarted in his and their designs. But, 
again, it is only too probable, from the internal 
evidences of the sonnets and from traditions that have 
come down to us, and from the very nature of things, 
that he had not held himself entirely aloof from the 
temptations of life, and, having tasted the cup of sin, 
that he had to drink its bitter dregs in repentance. 
Thus we may readily conceive how the vision of this 
full orbed single soul could, with such large discourse, 
behold the soul of man, and mirror it, and manifest 
it to us in this self-revelation. 

An en'try in the Stationer's Register in 1602, speaks 
of a proposed copy of Hamlet, "as it was lately 
acted." The Clarendon Editors infer from this that 



1 5 8 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

Hamlet then enjoyed only a recent popularity ; but 
to me it seems that this implies that improvements, 
or changes, had then recently been introduced into its 
earlier versions. All along he had been putting more 
of his dramatic art, his stage experience, and his knowl- 
edge of life, into it, as it grew to the clear and definite 
proportions of the first Quarto. But now into this Re- 
vision in the Second Quarto, the last Hamlet, he put 
himself. He thoroughly saturated it with his own 
personality, and, by the interpenetration of his own 
entity with the wavering shape of the Danish Prince, 
gave his great tragedy its present poetic and magnifi- 
cent form. The volcanic flashes of his genius reveal 
profoundest depths, intellectual and moral, of their 
source — the perturbed spirit of the author. How the 
gems of Shakespeare's rationality came to be imbedded 
in that strange, crude, barbarous, old legend, may then 
be best accounted for, according to our conviction, 
by the evohiiion of this tragedy of Hamlet. Evolution ! 
Yes, it is just in this fact that Hamlet was an evolu- 
tion, Shakespeare's evolution and not another's, that 
most of the difficulties of the play, its inconsistencies 
and contradictions of action, character and incident, 
may be explained, and in some degree removed. To 
its genesis and growth, it owes its perennial interest, 
"Born, not made : " trite, but powerful expression of 
the immeasurable difference between dead matter and 
living force ! Springing up from some germ dropped 
into the fecund imagination of the poet, it grows with 
his growth, and draws its sap and fibre from the storm 
and sunshine of his soul ; and, at last, it becomes a 
mighty monarch of the forest, like the cedar that 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN- PROBLEMS. 159 

guards the slopes of Libanus, or the gigantic redwood 
that towers in our own Yosemite, or some Druidical 
oak of its native soil. It has stood in our literature 
now for more than three centuries, and the magic 
circle of its shadows still fall upon the heart with the 
same, or a deeper, sense of mystery and spiritual 
meaning than when it first came into being. So that 
the perfect Hamlet — at first the picture of a particular 
man, as I conceive, and then the mirror of all man- 
kind — fully justifies the claim made for it in my 
former lecture to pre-eminence as the greatest creation 
of the greatest poet the world has ever seen. 



l6o THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET^ 



THE PLOT OF HAMLET. 

"This play is the image of a murther done in ? 

Hamlet, III. 2. 
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. ' ' 

Hamlet, II, 2. 

In my lecture on " The Significance of Hamlet," I 
believe I evinced no low estimate of the tremendous 
mystery and meaning of this mighty drama of the 
Human Will. If I have succeeded in apprehending 
these aright, it is by following in the footsteps of 
powerful and profound intellects of an older genera- 
tion, availing myself of their suggestions, and at- 
tempting to arrive at somewhat more exact and 
definite results. If others arrive at a different result, 
it would seem childish to quarrel with them for opin- 
ions on a subject so impersonal, and, I might say, so 
intangible. Still, as the odium, iheologicum appears to 
seize on so many Shakespearian commentators, one 
would feel a nervous dread of advancing any criti- 
cism, if sensitive to personal animadversion. Hence, 
I ought to say in this connection that, while reject- 
ing the Baconian Paradox, it is still with very great 
respect for the industry, ingenuity, acumen and logic 
of many advocates and adherents of that school. I 
am forced to believe the whole theory erroneous, 
groundless, but I attribute the error of its disciples, 
not to a lack of reasoning power, but to this or that 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. i6l 

mistake in the premises. Statements are accepted as 
facts which rest upon little evidence, and, from these, 
large inferences are made ; but the argumentation is 
vigorous enough when once set going. Its advo- 
cates reason as if they held a brief in the case. 

This preamble may be the more necessary as I am 
myself in this lecture about to venture upon a theory 
which has not met acceptance at the hands of the 
critics, even when it has attracted their attention, and 
which has been dismissed by a recent able writer, 
the author of "The Mystery of Hamlet," with super- 
cilious contempt. Now, while I am quite willing to 
concede that any new, or disputed, point in Shake- 
spearian criticism should be advanced with becom- 
ing diffidence, nevertheless, I must frankly submit 
what I conceive to be the most probable explanation 
of the origin of the play of Hamlet. If I am in error 
in this view, I shall still hope to show that there is 
something in it that deserves consideration at least. 

The significance of the play of Hamlet involves 
one of the great problems of human existence. Shake- 
speare has put this problem into the mechanism and 
action of the drama, and it enlists our interest and 
holds our intellects attent, as when the sculptor makes 
the marble speak to the inner sense of the beholder, 
or the architect builds a poem and a creed into the 
bricks and mortar of some grand cathedral. But it 
does not necessarily follow that the origin of the 
play was upon a plan in which the details from the 
first filled out the broad lines of the large theme. 
Such is not, as a rule, the genesis of the greatest 
creations of literary genius. The grandest results 

11 



1 6 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF IIAMLE T, 

are not those which spring from the most ambitious 
designs. Not the subject, but the treatment, lends 
dignity. The material employed is often but the 
common clay of our humanity, intended for mere 
homely uses ; it is the inspiration of the Divine 
Reason that enables the poet to render it subhme. 
His large discourse, his lofty imagination, and his 
soulful energy seize upon a story — a crude legend 
perhaps, or a trivial plot — and represent the persons 
who share in it, and it grows to greatness under his 
hand, as its phases reveal the interaction of emotion, 
intellection and will. It becomes the unconscious 
display of the poet's own spirit in his work, and 
hence an ideal in art. 

What I am leading up to is that it was not neces- 
sary for Shakespeare to analyze and consciously for- 
mulate his whole theory of Being — to perceive 
clearly the image of the human mystery in Hamlet — 
to see reflected there in its magic mirror the full-size 
likeness of himself — when he made the fir^t draft of 
his stage play. It was born, it grew, it became the 
splendid flower of his genius. But, at first, it was a 
play meant for the stage, though probably intended 
for other purposes, as well as for mere amusement. 
Its immediate purpose may have been to instruct a 
particular audience ; but it contained enough of wis- 
dom for its voices to reach out to all mankind. 
"Their line has gone out through all the earth, and 
their words to the end of the world." 

All the comment and criticism on the character of 
Hamlet has not gone much deeper than Goethe's 
thought, though a fuller unfolding of it may give us 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 163 

a better comprehension of him. And here the ques- 
tion may be started, how did Shakespeare come to 
conceive, to create, such a character? And, again, 
how did Shakespeare come to conceive such a char- 
acter ? Pregnant questions, but not unanswerable! 
For answer, we must look to the times, the environ- 
ment, the antecedents. Few will deny the influence 
of prevalent thought — of the Time-Spirit — and of the 
moulding activity of the environment upon literary 
production. To these, Shakespeare was amenable. 
They are seen in his quips, in his grossness, in his 
euphuism, in the turn and trick of his phrase, in the 
quick, lambent fire of his thought, in the audacity 
and largeness of his imagination. The age just gone 
by had been an era of revolt and overthrow. Protes- 
tantism had hurled down the Church of Rome in 
England, and new forms, institutions, doctrines and 
modes of thought had rushed in to supplant the old. 
The England of Elizabeth was a new world, a re- 
building of society. Strange things were in the air. 
Drake was sweeping the Spanish Main, and Raleigh 
planting the English race on a virgin continent. 
Bacon was building a new philosophy ; and Puritan- 
ism and Parliamentary government, in the search for 
truth and justice, were hardening their sinews for 
later strife and triumph. All was astir, in confusion. 
Had chaos come again ? Not so, for a surety. But 
all things were in question — facts, creeds, philoso- 
phies ; and yet reason still remained as Chief Inquis- 
itor. What men sought was to build not upon shams 
and delusions, but upon the Truth. But, "What is 
Truth?" O, question of the ages, first asked with 



1 64 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

lisping tongue by primeval man ; most memorably- 
demanded of Him, who standing before a Roman tri- 
bunal, was Himself the answer ! Yes, this was, and 
is, the question. Bishop Butler says: "I mean to 
make truth the business of my life ; " and Nathaniel W, 
Taylor tells us, ' ' Let us be true ; this is the highest 
maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and 
virtue, and of all moral authority." And these are 
but faint modern echoes of Ridley and Latimer, who 
lighted two candles in England that have not since 
gone out ; as, indeed, these again were but rever- 
berations of Epictetus and St. Paul. The Norman 
mind, intensely egotistic and independent, was also 
subtle, intellectual and religious. It had shaped the 
thought of England to chronic protest and revolt 
against all alien domination, temporal and spiritual. 
In that great revolt, the Protestant Reformation, 
every element in England concurred. Its power was 
as a national contest. Patriotism, love of liberty, the 
passion for fame and the energy of individual enter- 
prise fenced the throne of Elizabeth with the swords 
of gentle and simple alike. So that, as a rule, the 
great mass of those even who adhered to the old 
religion were Englishmen first and pre-eminently ; 
and, though there were fanatics of another kidney, 
the Catholic lords and yeomen rose to resist the 
Armada. So the Puritan Stubbs, whose hand had 
beeii stricken off for freedom of speech, waved the 
bloody stump, as he shouted, "God save Queen 
Elizabeth ! " ; and his comrade who suffered with him 
sturdily cried out, "There lies an honest English 
hand ! " The freedom of the individual spirit to seek, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 165 

and to find, the way, the truth, and the life, was im- 
plicit in the new gospel, in whatever forms it may- 
have been couched. England was never more en- 
thusiastically English than then. 

Shakespeare, an observer, a thinker, a maker, but 
always too, an Englishman, and young and ardent, 
was in the very maelstrom of English thought and 
feeling. To him, as to every high soul, the question 
comes : "Man : what, why, whence, whither.?" " I, 
too," says Arcturus, "Will cast my ray into the black 
abyss, and enlighten the darkness." But not a star in 
all the firmament, save the Day-Spring from on high, 
can do more than make this darkness visible. When 
all are reaching out blindly toward the Infinite, shall 
the master-thinker — the Seer — hold back his hand } 
Shall he not vaticinate .? What is truth ? What is 
man .? Is there a metaphysical order in the universe .? 
Is Fate all ? Is free-will naught ? Do the books tell 
it .'' Have the priests solved it } Such is the virgin 
skepticism that with reverent hand, in Shakespeare, 
lifts the curtain of the unknown. Into Hamlet's 
sad musings, Shakespeare projected his own soul 
and the spirit of his times, but he has also evinced 
prophetic vision, and heralded the dominant idea of 
the coming centuries. He it was, no less than the 
philosophers, preachers and martyrs, who with sweet- 
est accent ushered in the phantom doubt, that has 
since so stirred and guided modern thought. His 
wand evoked Goethe, it trained Darwin and Spencer, 
and disciplined Kingsley and Dean Stanley. And, O 
inconceivable thought ! that this arch-magician 
should be but a playright ! In the eternal fitness of 



1 66 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

things, how could he be less than an Inductive 
Philosopher, an Apothegmatic Essayist, and a Lord 
Chancellor and Viscount St. Albans ? 

Is it possible for us to discover now why this play 
was written, for what purpose, to what end? To 
amuse! Surely — but no more? To instruct! In- 
dubitably — but whom, wherefore ? The World ! Yes. 
the world, large and small ; that little world, the 
Court of his puissant and high-stomached princess, 
the Virgin Queen, and those other millions who have 
since soliloquized with Hamlet and wept with the 
fair Ophelia. But was there no great personage to 
whom the lesson of Hamlet might carry a present 
lesson of special significance, to whom it might be 
a matter of pith and moment ; and was there no 
coterie to whose policy its teachings might render ac- 
ceptable service ? Perhaps it may be difficult to prove 
this in manner and form, to demonstrate it beyond 
controversy ; but, in the prevalent nebulosity about 
Shakespeare's plays, and the natural interest every 
aspect of them excites, some suggestions on these 
points may not be unacceptable, which the diligent 
antiquarian may, if he please, afterwards work out to 
fruitful results. 

In the study of Shakespeare's plays, not only the 
method of his art engages us, but this wherefore! 
Why Hamlet, and not something else? Why did 
Shakespeare write this particular play in this particu- 
lar way, at the particular point of time when it was 
first acted ? To some minds accident is a sufficient 
cause, and we do, indeed, find insignificant things 
often the proximate causes of great events. But 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARrAN PROBLEMS. 167 

most causes are adequate ; and the more adequate, 
the more expHcable are they. In considering the 
production of a play and its raison d'etre, it is not amiss 
to recollect not only the literary skill and method 
of the author, but what manner of man he was. I 
have already tried in few words to depict the 
Elizabethan epoch as an era of awakening-, the leafy 
June of English thought. I have described Shakes- 
peare, too, as a high-souled poet and consummate 
artist, a seer to whom all the windows of the soul 
were open, from the outlooks of which a thousand 
vistas of the world of man declared themselves to his 
vision. Such is the poet, as he stands like Moses 
upon Horeb, and as we see him in the fullness of his 
intellectual stature. But when his pontifical robes 
are cast aside, and he descends into the arena of 
actual life, we find that Shakespeare was a man of 
affairs too ; nay, even a man about town ; he was a 
writer with a patron, a writer for a patron ; he was also 
an active member of a stage company, playing second 
best parts, but adapting, even composing, immortal 
dramas. But, most of all, he was an Englishman, and, 
as such, both a patriot and a politician. His patriot- 
ism breathes through the mighty music of his dramas, 
even as the undertone comes to us, in the awful rush 
and roar of waters at Niagara. He puts into the 
mouth of Falconbridge, one of his favorites and a 
most typical Englishman the words : 

"This England never did, and never shall, 
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 
But when it first did help to wound itself." 

King John, V. 7. 



1 68 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Public affairs were neither unknown, nor uncared for 
by him. He had a right to feel an interest in them. 
Was not his father, the wool-stapler, " of the corpo- 
ration of the borough } '' By birth he belonged to 
that sturdy middle-class, which, by patient, persistent 
resolution, has wrung its liberties from Crown and 
nobles, and with them the control of England. But, 
though, as a strolling player, he had swung away from 
his local moorings and parish politics, he had drifted 
into that vast pool, the Court and its purlieus, in 
which all the great movements of the realm were 
matters of keenest personal intei"est. In that brilliant 
circle of versatile Bohemians, "the Queen's poor 
players," to which he belonged, all questions of politi- 
cal moment, as well as the artistic side of life, were 
discussed with vivid curiosity. They were, as a rule, 
the dependents, or partisans, of some powerful and 
munificent patron, and were warmed or chilled as 
the sunshine of royalty fell upon, or was withdrawn 
from, their Maecenas. In modern political phrase, 
they were his " henchmen ; " and their duty was not 
only to amuse the leisure, but oftentimes to serve the 
purposes or advance the fortunes, of their chief 
This is illustrated in this very tragedy of Hamlet, 
when the Player King and his company perform a 
part not found in the roles of dramatic companies — 
"to catch the conscience of the King." To his com- 
pany of players, a politic patron might very well com- 
mit the delicate task of conveying an unwelcome truth 
in pleasing form, or of suggesting lines of action that 
might not be declared, or of hinting in allegory what 
he might wish attempted in action. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 169 

In 1586, the point of time at which we will assume 
that the first draft of the play of Hamlet was con- 
ceived, the political horizon was lowering, and a 
death struggle seemed imminent between the party 
of reaction and the English C9urt. The former 
centred its hopes on the captive Queen of Scots ;« 
while England, apart from the papistical faction, 
looked to Elizabeth as the pole-star in the politi- 
cal firmament War with Rome existed in Eng- 
land, though undeclared and waged with poison 
and poignard only ; but none the less war, because 
tacit and with conspiracy as the strategy of closet 
and council chamber. High and mighty ones ad- 
vised the assassination of Elizabeth, and she herself 
tried to instigate the jailers of the Queen of Scots to 
murder her privately after her condemnation. 

Plot followed plot, all to end abortively under the 
lynx-eyed vigilance of Burleigh and Walsingham. 
The Duke of Norfolk, two Earls of Northumberland, 
William Parry, and others, perished because of their 
attempts; but, in 1586, the formidable conspiracy, 
known as " Babington's ", brought matters to a head. 
Mary Stuart was regarded as the centre of the 
machinations aimed at the life and throne of Eliza- 
beth, whose masculine spirit and genius for finesse 
did not shrink from the death-grapple. Without pro- 
nouncing here on the right or wrong of this intricate 
question, from the point of view of the English Coun- 
cil and Court and of the patriot faction, and, possibly, 
of Elizabeth herself, the death of Queen Mary had 
become necessary to secure her safety and the peace 
and glory of England. I do not say that this view 



I70 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

was correct, but it was that of the worldly-wise 
councilors of Elizabeth, and, so far as success justi- 
fies policy, it has such further sanction. The national 
party, as well as enthusiastic Protestants, believed in 
and supported this course. 

You must permit me here to assume, without argu- 
ment, as correct, the view of Froude, based, in part, 
upon the representations of Chasteauneuf, the French 
Ambassador o the King of France : "The Council 
and people generally," he said, "were earnest that 
she should be executed, but he did not think Elizabeth 
herself would consent to extremities if she could 
help it." Secretary Davison confirmed the opinion 
of the French Ambassador. 

It is very difficult to decide positively by what 
name the Company went to which Shakespeare first 
attached himself, nor is to it our present purpose ; 
whether Lord Leicester's, Lord Strange's, the Queen's, 
or the Lord Chamberlain's, matters very little. Lei- 
cester and Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, 
were almost equally involved in the proceedings 
against Mary, and in the Council voted for her con- 
demnation and execution. And, though the Stanleys 
were Catholic, Lord Strange's father. Lord Derby, 
was a violent Loyalist, and rallied to Elizabeth when 
the Spanish Armada was threatening. The patrons 
of Shakespeare and his fellow-players were, from 
whatever motives, hostile to the Queen of Scots, and 
we find Shakespeare attached through life to, what 
might be called, in such a network of intrigue as the 
Court of Elizabeth presented, the National Party, or 
to that branch of it at least that Leicester and Essex 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 171 

headed. Southampton, his patron, was Essex's 
nearest friend. When Mary fell however, Burghley, 
Walsingham, Leicester, the noble Sussex, Hunsdon, 
and many more, felt that a hard necessity required 
her death. Let us suppose this inchoate policy tak- 
ing shape. Suppose the execution of Queen Mary 
settled upon, or discussed even, as the true cutting of 
a tangled political knot, and we may safely assume 
that these far-sighted and ambidextrous statesmen 
would neglect no means to justify so audacious a 
stroke, or at very least to try the temper of that 
doubtful middle opinion that counts for so much. 
This was to be reconciled. After the execution these 
arguments became the more necessary in view of 
the attitude of Elizabeth, who repudiated all responsi- 
bility for it, and when her chief councilors were in 
peril of life and property from her. 

But there was another factor that could not be dis- 
regarded, namely. King James of Scotland. James 
was the son of the woman whose death upon the 
scaffold was foredoomed. It is hard to conceive any 
line of argument, or set of circumstances, that would 
wring from this champion of the divine right of 
kings a compromise with regicide, or from a son 
even a tacit assent to his mother's ignominious execu- 
tion. But Elizabeth knew her man. Great is Ego 
always; but, in that cold heart and clear, tortuous 
brain. Self reigned supreme. First of all, he was a 
Stuart, which always meant a multitude of mean- 
nesses, and a mass of littlenesses. He was King of 
Scotland too, and heir presumptive to the throne of 
England by grace of the Great Queen, under whose 



1 7 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

wing- he dods^ed and llutlcrcd as a sub-King' or King- 
lot, — a stripling prince of twenty — the sole royal 
chick in her brood of aspirants. By her support he 
maintained his authority over a turbulent nobility ; 
and his mother's imprisonment, or death, was the 
only sure guaranty of his privilege to reign at all. 
His title was defeasible quite, if Queen Mary got the 
upper hand. Such an event would upset his throne, 
and even put in peril his sacred person, so precious 
to himself ; for (juestions would be started that the 
sword alone could settle. It is well known that 
Mary's resentment at his alliance with Elizabeth 
induced her to assent to a plan for his capture and 
deposition. His only real safety lay in the protec- 
tion of England. Nevertheless, a King is a piece on 
the national chessboard not to be despised ; — nay, 
even a Kinglet, if he be a son and a man, must be 
taken into account. The crooked Cecilian policy, 
looking to James as its future monarch, owed to him 
this deference, that a fair plea be made for its harsh 
deed, as a sop to the royal conscience, if no more. 
To this end, it is probable, no argument was omitted, 
nor any means neglected. True, Elizabeth hated 
James, as the son of her rival and her own rightful 
heir, but she was too wise to ignore him. To James 
and to the world, then, must be justilied the hard 
necessity, the cruel compulsion, of the bloody deed. 
The INIaster of Gray, James' go-between with the 
English Government, which had bought him, writ- 
ing to Areliibald Douglas, September i8, 1586, says, 
of tlie king : "His opinion is it cannot stand with 
his honor that he be a consenter to take his mother's 



AND OT/f/Ch' .S/fAK/CU'EANfAN PROJi f.F.M:;. 



'73 



life, but he is content how strictly slie be kept, and 
all her old knavish servants hanged, chiefly they 
that be in hands. For this you must deal warily to 
eschew inconvcnients, seeing- necessity of all honest 
men's affairs requires she was taken away. " (Froude, 
History of Knj^land, XII. 292). 

Every plea, direct and indirect, would be put forth. 
We know that both money and promises were used, 
and Sir Robert Carey, son of Shakespeare's patron, 
the Lord Chamberlain Ilunsdon, was sent on a spe- 
cial mission to placate the wounded honor of king 
James. Among other agencies, the stage might well 
be employed for the teaching of important political 
object lessons. A play that should stir the minds 
and hearts of the Court, then the center of intellectual 
and political activity, against the unhappy captive 
queen, was an engine too powerful to be overlooked. 
Nor was James, with his fondness for pageantry and 
the theatre, apt to disregard such teaching. The vivid 
presentation of a case, odious indeed, yet closely 
analogous to xMary's own, might make that queen 
appear to him as the victim of a just retribution. It 
has already been pointed out that in this very tragedy 
of Hamlet a play is interpolated, as in Shakespeare's 
conception a proper political device. Such a device 
was not foreign to his ideas, or to the resources of 
diplomacy. The powerful tragedy of F^dward II, by 
Christopher Martowe, was also produced about this 
time; Warton thinks it was written in 1590. It may 
have been earlier ; but, whether written before or 
after 'the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, it was 
a similar case of the killing of a king with the con- 



174 



THE rKOTOTYPE OF JIAMLET. 



nivance of his guilty queen, another blast to blow into 
flame the popular indignation against such naughty 
deeds, and to palliate, excuse, or justify, such a doubt- 
ful political act as the execution of the sovereign of 
* a sister country. 

We find this use of the play, as well as of other 
forms of literature, for political purposes, quite fre- 
quent in English history. Plumptre cites Rowe's 
Tamerlane in 1702, Addison's Cato in 1713, Mallet's 
Elvira in 1763, and the Fall of Mortimer in the same 
year, as notable instances of this appliance; and the 
reader can recall many instances, in our own day, of 
the same kind ; for instance, the Octoroon and Uncle 
Tom's Cabin. 

England was on fire with loyal zeal and Anti-Papist 
rage ; and it is not unlikely that a young, impulsive 
and ardent soul, the playwright Shakespeare, should 
share in the general patriotic delirium, in which all 
classes were involved. On Mary's trial (if such it 
can be called), the charges against her were that she 
had "conspired the destruction of Queen Elizabeth 
and of England and the subversion of religion." 

Parliament in an address to the Queen, November 
5th, 1586, urged that the sentence upon the Queen 
of Scots be immediately carried into execution, "be- 
cause, upon advised and grave consultation, we can- 
not find that there is any possible means to provide 
for your Majesty's safety, but by the just and speedy 
death of said Queen." 

'• When the judgment of the Commissioners was 
proclaimed in London by sound of trumpet, the bells 
tolled many peals for twenty-four hours, bonfires 



AND OTHER SITAKKSPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 175 

Ijlazed in the streets, and the citizens appeared intox- 
icated with joy, as if a great victory had been obtained 
over a foreign enemy. These rejoicings were re- 
doul)led on the news of her execution. " (Campbell's 
Lord Chancellors, v. 2, p. 123). 

In extracts from the " Register of the Stationers" 
(Vol. 2, p. 145), we find, as early as May 30, 1581, 
licensed to Garrath James, a ballad, declaring the 
Treason conspired against 'the King of Scots. 

In the entries of 1587, we find a number of ballads 
and pamphlets justifying the execution of Mary, 
Queen of Scots; among others, "An excellent ditty 
made as a general rejoicing for the cutting off the 
Scottish Queen ", licensed nineteen days after her 
death. 

On the 8th of August, 1587, was licensed, "A ditty 
of Lord Darnley, sometime King of Scots." 

Mary was executed February i, 1587. In the eyes 
of Shakespeare and of the English people, the plots 
against Elizabeth in the name of the deposed Queen 
were acts of treason and rebellion. To them the 
captive was but a conspirator, while Elizabeth was 
queen, the queen, and poor Mary's taking off seemed 
but the just penalty of attempted regicide. This and 
the murder of Darnley are the crimes to which the 
author points as demanding retribution. It is to this 
view and these feelings, that we must attribute such 
passages as the following : 

" There's such a divinity, etc." (Act iv, S. 5, L. 118). 

"The single and peculiar life is bound, etc." (Act 
iii, S. 3, L. 10.) 

The latter of these quotations, however, is not in 



176 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

the First Quarto, and may very well have been added 
much later to please the absolutist tendencies of either 
James or Elizabeth. 

When Mary's head had fallen on the block, what- 
ever may have been Elizabeth's real sentiments, we 
know that she utterly repudiated the act, disgraced 
her secretary Davison, sent Burleigh to the Tower, 
and ominously hinted that but for their services she 
would have had the heads of Burleigh, Walsingham 
and Leicester. Now was the time then for them and 
their friends to bestir themselves, and, if Hamlet was 
not produced before that time, there was a pressing 
exigency in which it might well do good service. 
We cannot say positively that it was at this moment 
that it first appeared, but it would seem a time when 
a reason for it is most evident. 

Let us assume now that the policy of Mary's 
execution had been determined upon or had even 
been carried out, and that the Lord Chamberlain, or 
the Earl of Leicester, or Lord Hundson, should give 
a hint that a play on such a theme, with plot pointed 
out or left to the invention of the playwright as we 
may decide, would be most graciously received, 
and, indeed, munificently rewarded. Whoever else 
may have been called to stir in this matter, we may 
rest assured that the hand of one William Shakespeare 
was pre-eminent therein. The era of dramatic in- 
cubation had dawned. Ten years later, about 1596, 
new plays, tragedies, comedies, pastorals, masques, 
revels, what not, were hatched like spring chickens 
— forty in less than two years in the theatres in which 
this Shakespeare, then at the head of his profession, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. I'j'j 

was actor, manager, or playwright. But even now 
he was recognized as a power. He may have been 
a pot-hunter in Hterature, writing for bread or gold, 
but then and always he was a Titan. Without doubt 
he was the lawyer's clerk, yclept by the jealous 
Nash, " a Noverint," who had a hand in the tragedy, 
the burthen whereof was " Hamlet ! Revenge ! " If 
anything could make us doubt this fact, it would be, 
as has been said, the dissent of such critics as Richard 
Grant White and the Clarendon editors ; but, though 
it may put us in a quandary to disagree with them, 
the weight of evidence seems for Shakespeare's 
authorship. Indeed, assuming the First Quarto to 
represent this version, as in substance it most prob- 
ably does, though enlarged, improved and developed, 
we may say we ^?zoze^ Shakespeare wrote it ; just as 
we say Michael Angelo did this and Raphael this, 
because no other could; just as we say, this is the 
work of the lightning, this of the whirlwind, and this 
of the ocean, because heaven employs no less agencies 
for such effects. So, if we find the first Hamlet un- 
equal to Shakespeare's best handiwork, yet we know 
it to be his, because it is better than the best of other 
men. But this first draft must be regarded as the 
sapling which grew into a giant oak, with arms ever 
sturdier and unfolding a finer foliage. 

Let us suppose our author to have received his 
commission. If it please any idolater better, let him 
believe the spring of it to have been in Shakespeare's 
own national, patriotic and Protestant feeling. But 
we must not forget that, however honest a man he 
may have been, he was by profession a courtier's 

12 



178 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

courtier, the minister in a minor court. It may be 
remembered that the "Midsummer Night's Dream" 
contains an allusion to a mermaid, supposed to be 
aimed at Mary Stuart, coupled with a compliment to 
Elizabeth, as " a fair vestal," — though this was prob- 
ably written in 1592. The poet, however, has received 
his inspiration from heaven or the Council. A play 
is wanted that will fit the case ; broad in its bearings, 
stirring in its incidents, human enough in its relations 
to call a halt in thought, and yet subtle to touch this 
particular grievance of royal assassination to the 
quick with fatal suggestion. What shall the plot be ? 
First of all, the murder of a king, and the marriage 
of his widow with the murderer — and then there must 
needs be a young prince, who in the mazes of doubt 
is called to revenge. 

If Shakespeare desired a pattern for Hamlet, or for 
Darnley's death, he might have found it, indeed may 
have heard of it, in the curious spectacle enacted be- 
fore the Lords at Stirling, within a fortnight after 
Mary's marriage to Bothwell. 

Among the letters of Sir Wm. Drury to Cecil is one 
quoted by Miss Strickland (Queens of Scotland, Vol. 
5,265), in which he says. May 26, 1567: "There 
hath been an interlude of boys played at Stirling, 
which hath much offended the Earl of Bothwell, for 
the same was the manner of the king's death, and the 
arraignment of the Earl, who in the play he that did 
represent him was hanged, meaning but in sport." 
The boy player was, as it appears, hanged too long, 
and came near dying. 

There is a rude old legend in Saxo Grammaticus, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 179 

known to learned clerks, which Belleforest, after a 
fashion, put into French in his " Histoires Tragiques, 
about 1570; which again was translated into Eng- 
lish, as the "Hystorie of Hamblet." This was 
court literature, and the story seems made to hand to 
suit the case of James and his mother. But, if it mis- 
carry, after all what is it but a fable, done over for the 
stage, and no scandal meant ? Under feigned names, 
poor, base, vicious, handsome Darnley, a royal 
simulacrum, shall come back in this day dream to a 
more real life, as "my father's ghost," and bloody 
Both well, that "adulterate beast," shall live again as 
the felon king. And the queen ? — the queen ! There 
is, alas, but one queen whose unhappy fate has been 
to marry with her husband's murderer, and she is now 
in the toils, and Nemesis glides on the stage. Ham- 
let .'' In this Prince of Denmark, " that unmatched 
form and feature of blown youth," whom shall all 
men see but that fair bud of royal promise, the 
modern Solomon, the young King James, who, with 
his quiddities and bookish ways, may even himself, 
perchance, perceive his own princely likeness in this 
looking glass. Some commentators have even be- 
lieved that they have found the pattern of Polonius 
in Lord Burleigh, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, or other 
of Elizabeth's Council, and, it maybe also, ofRosen- 
crantz and Guildenstern and Osric in the minions and 
butterflies of the Court. Sans doute, had we the 
chance to parley with some shrewd maid of honor of 
that day, we would know it all. We have been told, 
I believe, that Essex, or Sir Philip Sidney, sat for the 
portrait of Hamlet. But we have not so far to go ; 



l8o THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

for Shakespeare's picture of the heir of Denmark is 
more than a likeness, it is the very counterpart, of 
the heir of England. In King James we may tind 
the prototype of Hamlet. 

I cannot hope to establish this claim unchallenged ; 
but, having exhibited what I conceive to be a 
sufticient political motive for the production of this 
play, before entering on a consideration of the plot I 
beg leave to note the following circumstances. 
Some twenty years ago I observed the striking 
points of likeness in the murder of Darnley to the 
plot of Hamlet, and the resemblance of James 
and Hamlet in character, and supposed that the 
discovery was original with me. I subsequently 
found, however, that nearly a century ago the Rev. 
Mr. Plumptre had pointed out some of the more 
obvious of these parallelisms. Though I have the 
pamphlet, Furness' succinct statement of the points 
in Plumptre's pamphlet gives its substance with 
sufficient clearness ; and this I quote, in order to ac- 
cord due credit to the first finder, especially as he set 
great store by his discovery. I subjoin Carl Silber- 
schlag's paradoxical additions to it.* Furness says : 

"In 1796, James Plumptre, M.A., published some 
observations on Hamlet, etc., being an attempt to 
prove that (Shakespeare) designed (this tragedy) as 
an indirect censure on Mary, Queen of Scots. In^ 
this volume the author assumes that since Shake- 
speare in 1592 did not hesitate, in the Midsummer 
Night's Dream, to compliment Elizabeth at the ex- 
pense of Mary, he would have no scruples in still 
* Furness' Variorum Hamlet, Vol. 1 1 , p. 236. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. i8i 

further flattering his royal mistress in 1596 (the date 
when Hamlet was written), by addiny; his drop to 
the flood of calumny poured out over her rival. This 
hypothesis obliges him to maintain that the Queen 
in Hamlet was an accessory to her husband's death. " 
"Plumptre adduces the following passages and 
allusions to show that Shakespeare had Mary, Queen 
of Scots, directly in mind when he wrote them ; ' In 
second husband let me be accursed ! None wed the 
second but who killed the first,' (HI. ii, 169;) and 
* The instances that second marriage move are base 
respects of thrift, but none of love.' — (lb. 172), 
'which, says the author, ' appear to be so strongly 
marked as almost of themselves to establish the 
hypothesis.' Next, Gertrude's haste to marry the 
murderer of her husband. Lord Darnley was mur- 
dered on the 10th February, 1567, and Mary was 
married to Bothwell on the 14th of May following, a 
space of time but just exceeding three months. 
Lord Darnley was the handsomest young man in the 
kingdom, but of a weak mind ; it is remarkable in 
Hamlet no compliment is paid to the murdered 
king's intellectual qualities. Bothwell was twenty 
years older than Mary, and is represented as an ugly 
man by the historians. He was also noted for his 
debauchery and drinking, two circumstances which 
Shakespeare seems never to lose sight of in his char- 
acter of Claudius. Ophelia's allusion to the ' beau- 
teous majesty of Denmark,' IV. v., Plumptre says 
is inapplicable to Gertrude, because ' she was past 
the prime of life, not to say old,' whereas it applies 
most justly to Mary, who was only forty-five when 



1 8 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T. 

she was beheaded, and very beautiful. In the be- 
ginning of Hamlet the hero is represented as very 
young, but in the graveyard we are told that he was 
thirty years old. 'James was just thirty at the 
writing of this play. ' Whereupon Plumptre remarks : 
* Shakespeare seems to have been so blinded by the 
circumstances he wished to introduce that he has 
fallen into many improbabilities between his two 
plans.' Shakespeare mentions the King as having 
been taken off, " in the blossom of his sin," ' which,' 
says Plumptre, ' is incompatible with the ideas we 
have of the King's age in the play, but most truly 
applicable to Lord Darnley.' In Hamlet's delay 
Shakespeare had in mind the backwardness of James 
to revenge his father's murder. 'Among other re- 
markable coincidences between the plot of Hamlet 
and the circumstances attendant on Mary and James, 
we may enumerate that of Dr. Wotton being sent 
into Scotland by Elizabeth as a spy upon James, and 
who afterwards entered into a conspiracy to deliver 
him into her hands.' Here we have the part of 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ' The incident of 
Polonius being murdered in the presence of the 
Queen, in her closet, bears a resemblance to the mur- 
der of Rizzio in Mary's apartment' ' Both well had 
poisoned Mary's cup of happiness, and it was her 
marriage with him that was the cause of her sorrows 
and death.' 

"In 1797, Plumptre published an Appendix, in 
which additional parallelisms are given, and great 
stress is laid on the effects of poison on Darnley ; 
Knox and Buchanan ' mention the black and putrid 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 183 

pustules which broke out all over his body ; ' this 
corresponds to the tetter, which ' bark'd about, most 
lazar like, with vile and loathesome crust, all the 
smooth body ' of Hamlet's father. Hume's descrip- 
tion of James (vol i, p. i, 4, 4to ed,) is cited to show 
that the character of Hamlet is his character, ' but it 
is a flattering likeness ; it is James drawn in the 
fairest colors ; his harsh features softened and his 
deformities concealed.' Hamlet's love of the stage 
and patronage of the players resembled James's. 
Finally, from travellers' accounts, Plump tre infers 
that ' the shore on which Elsinore stands consists of 
ridges of sand, rising one above the other ; ' there 
could not, therefore, be any ' dreadful summit of a 
cliff that beetles o'er his base,' and ' looks so many 
fathoms down ' amid such scenery ; but this descrip- 
tion suits Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Palace. " 

"This theory of Plumptre's (who, by the way, 
apologizes in his preface for any typographical errors 
to be found in the volume, on the ground of his exces- 
sive anxiety to publish his views before he could be 
anticipated and robbed of the glory of his discovery), 
this theory was treated with silent indifference for nigh 
three-quarters of a century, until a few years ago. It 
was revived in Germany, apparently without any sus- 
picion that it was not novel. Carl Silberschlag, in the 
Morgenblatt, Nos 46, \1, i860, brought, forward the 
same arguments with which we are familiar to prove 
that under Gertrude was veiled an allusion to Mary 
Stuart, that Hamlet was James, and Claudius, Both- 
well. Biit the ingenious German scholar went farther, 
and found that other characters in the tragedy had their 



1 84 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

prototypes among James's contemporaries. The 
laird of Gowrie had a father's murder to avenge, and 
had lived in Paris, and had a faithful servant named 
Rhynd, and met his death in an attempt by stratagem 
on the life of the King. All this prefigures Laertes 
and Reynaldo ; unfortunately, an air of burlesque is 
cast over the theory by the argument gravely uttered, 
that Laird is pronounced just like {gans so kltngt) 
Laertes ! After the death of the Laird, his bride, 
Anna Douglas, became insane, — hence Ophelia. In 
the 'vicious, mole' i, iv, 24, Silberschlag finds cumu- 
lative evidence of the truth of his theory." He 
identified it with James's congenital horror of a drawn 
dagger. " 

" Moberly noticed, though not in reference to this 
theory of Plumptre's, that the language with which 
Hamlet speaks of the dead body of Polonius is almost 
exactly the same as that used by the Porter at 
Holyrood in reference to the dead body of Rizzio. 
(See HI, iv, 215)." 

"Hunter (New Illustrations, etc. ii, 204) says if 
the composition of Hamlet can really be carried back 
to a time before 1589, 'there may be some ground 
for the opinion of those who have thought that there 
were strokes in it levelled at the Queen of Scots, who 
was put to death in 1587." In view of what has 
been advanced in these lectures there can be no doubt 
about the date being thus early. 

It cannot be said that Plumptre presented his argu- 
ment with much force. He was so enamoured of his 
idea that every possible suggestion seemed addi- 
tional proof to him, and his zeal really injured his 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 185 

cause. Then no sufficient motive was suggested by 
him for the adoption of this play of Darnley's Murder 
by the author. Besides, much additional evidence 
has been brought to view since Plumptre's day, 
which throws light upon questions which could not 
be answered without it. The first known copy of Q i 
was only discovered in 1823, nearly a generation 
later, by Sir Henry Bunbury, and it is from the com- 
parative study of this with Q 2 that some of the 
strongest proofs of this theory are derived. It has 
been so constantly asserted that the play of Hamlet 
was written by Shakespeare after 1597, and from ten 
to fifteen years later than its earliest production by 
some other author, that the points of resemblance in 
the murders have been disregarded by commentators. 
In 1597, Darnley's murder and Mary's execution 
were no longer in the arena of politics. There would 
be no political motive for selecting these incidents, 
or their analogue, as the basis of an appeal on the 
stage to king or people. But if the view be adopted 
that Shakespeare wrote the original acting-play of 
Hamlet in 1586 or 1587, most of the objections 
disappear to the theory that the plot pointed to the 
murder of Darnley and Mary's connivance in it, which 
were then on every tongue. Her execution was 
then the question of the day ; his patrons were all 
personally deeply interested in the issue ; all Europe 
was excited over it ; and it was even used by Spain 
as a justification of the invasion of England by the 
Armada. 

Am I right, then, in supposing that this play was 
originally intended to recall to memory the death of 



1 8 6 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

Darnley, and to spur the timid James to connive at 
his mother's death, and perhaps even go beyond 
in pursuing his father's murderers? The Council 
may even have had in view the abhorrence of the 
Queen's death pretended by Elizabeth, whether it 
were real or disingenuous, and found in Hamlet, 
"the Encourager of Hesitancy." The three grounds 
for believing such the original intention of the tragedy 
should be first, the motives of the English Govern- 
ment and of Shakespeare himself in bringing out the 
play, which have been already perhaps sufficiently 
illustrated ; second, the resemblance in the plot and 
details of the play to the death of Darnley and the 
attendant circumstances ; and, lastly, the resem- 
blance, shall I say identity, of the character of 
James I with that of Hamlet. 

Furness' summary has given us Plumptre's argument 
in which the analogy of the plots is discussed, though 
somewhat hastily and heatedly. But I would ask 
the reader to follow me in this matter calmly. Let 
us look at the ' terrain. ' Where is Hamlet located.? 
German criticism thinks him into Germany. Dr. 
Eckardt (i i 303), says : " Hamlet is a character of the 
North, where all life is more earnest and intense, 
etc." Bierne (11, 289) says : " Hamlet has a Northern 
soil, and a Northern heaven." Zimmermann (p. 341) 
says : "his character was found in the Danish world." 
And so with others. But all this is superficial. True, 
the play is of "Hamlet, prince of Denmark." But 
what did the word Denmark signify to Shakespeare.? 
All his men are in reality British ; but they are veri- 
tably men, and hence all can, or may, comprehend 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 187 

them. To the German, they are Germans ; to the 
Dane, Danes ; to us, Americans. It is quite evident 
that Shakespeare knew nothing and cared nothing 
about Denmark — as such. His geography was of the 
most elastic kind. His Bohemia has a coast — an 
absolutely requisite one. But there is much to induce 
us to believe that if the word ' Scotland ' was every- 
where substituted for Denmark, and the whole pa- 
geantry were transposed from Elsinore to Edinburgh, 
we would have a graphic conception of the pictures 
that Shakespeare was making in his own mind, as 
he composed Hamlet. It is probable that Shake- 
speare visited Scotland in 1589 to play before the 
king ; and the touches that characterize the locality 
may have been introduced after that period, though 
there is no good reason why he should not have 
learned about the topography before that from books 
and travellers. One of his patrons. Lord Hunsdon, 
had been on a mission to Scotland in 1584, and his son 
was also there in April, 1587, two months after Mary's 
death. The scenery is Scottish. The platform where 
Hamlet sees his father's ghost well describes Holy- 
rood, the palace of James, — "the dreadful summit of 
a cliff that beetles o'er his base . . . and look so many 
fathoms down," but is entirely unlike Elsinore, which 
stand upon a series of sandy ridges. 

We must bear in mind that there is nothing really 
medieval in the play, nor any attempt to conform it 
to the thought or customs of any former, much less a 
remote or barbarous, age. All is contemporaneous. 
The drunkenness and debauchery assigned to Den- 
mark, which certainly did belong historically to 



r88 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Hamlet's own barbarous era and country, were like- 
wise the vices prevalent in Scotland. And, as the 
usurping Bothwell was one among the grossest exam- 
ples of both vices in actual life, so Claudius, who fills 
his part in the play, is stigmatized throughout as the 
leader in all orgies. These assaults are put into the 
mouth of the Prince, the archetype of the youthful 
Solomon, who had not as yet displayed in full his 
taste for strong drink and other hereditary tendencies. 
He says satirically to Horatio, "We'll teach you to 
drink deep ere you depart." (i, 2, 175). Again, 

" The King doth wake to-night aud take his rouse, 
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels ; 
And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, 

etc. (i, 4, 10). " This heavy-headed revel", "they 
clepe us drunkards, " "the bloat king," and many 
other similar expressions, are censures, which, though 
applicable enough to England then, still more forcibly 
point to Scotland and to Bothwell. 

The Denmark of Shakespeare's Hamlet is not the 
Denmark of Saxo-Grammaticus, nor, indeed, of any 
other ag3 or time. Lowell says * : 

"In Hamlet, though there is no Denmark of the 
ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the pre- 
vailing rudeness of manners quite enough for his 
purpose. We see it in the single combat of Hamlet's 
father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar wassail 
of the king, in the English monarch being expected 
to hang Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand, 
merely to oblige his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, 
sent to Paris to be made a gentlemen of, becoming 
'* Among my Books," p 208. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 189 

instantly capable of the most barbarous treachery 
to glut his vengeance." ... "All through the play 
we get the notion of a state of society in which a 
savage society has disguised itself in the externals 
of civilization." 

These remarks of Lowell, in his admirable essay 
on ''Shakespeare Once More" are just, and, taken in 
connection with Shakespeare's method of appropriat- 
ing what was at hand as the material into which he 
infused his vitalizing spirit, instead of hunting for it 
from afar, indicate that this Denmark of Hamlet was 
not only not a Denmark of the ninth century, but not 
Denmark at all, except in name. His spiritual Den- 
mark was in the recesses of his own soul ; his fleshly 
Denmark was all about him. Nor had he far to go 
to find that which was at once sufficiently famihar for 
popular interest and yet remote enough for stage illu- 
sion. Scotland was near at hand; Scotland was "a 
burning question ; " yet it was not trite or common 
place in London in the last quarter of the sixteenth 
century. And, measured even by such standard as the 
grossness of English manners, Scotland, in Shake- 
speare's day, offered a striking contrast, from its still 
ruder and more revolting forms of licentiousness, in- 
temperance and cruelty, and invited the censure he 
affixes to the Court of Denmark. Courtiers could 
readily read between the lines. We have only to 
consult the writings of contemporaneous travellers to 
learn these facts. 

Lowell says: "Shakespeare seems purposely to 
have dissociated his play from history by changing 
nearly every name in the original legend. The mo- 



190 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 



tive of the play — revenge as a religious duty — 
belongs only to a social state in which the traditions 
of barbarism are still operative ; but w^ith infallible 
artistic judgment Shakespeare had chosen, not un- 
tamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period 
of transition, a period in vi^hich the times are always 
out of joint, and thus the irresolution which has its 
root in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the 
very incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he 
has inherited from the past with the new culture and 
refinement of which he is the representative." 

Without intending it, Lowell has here described 
the exact social phase of Scotland, after the Refor- 
mation and before the Union, a veritable era of 
transition, and also the condition under which James . 
found himself. He had been educated by his mother's 
bitterest enemies. Crafty and irresolute by nature, 
and trained in casuistry as well as in theology, his 
lot was cast in a time of religious and political revol- 
ution, a very "sea of troubles," with the personal 
legacy of revenge from a murdered father. How to 
acquit this debt was the question he had to meet. By 
punishment of the guilty, says the ghost, says his 
own first impulse, says the invisible chorus which 
seems to swell the symphony of revenge. By sui- 
cide, by submission, by delay, reply the timorous 
vacillating heart and the subtle speculative intellect. 
And while this debate defers decision, Fate steps in 
and mates the King, and sweeps from the board all 
the chief pieces in this game of life. And shall the 
real Prince, him of Scotland, take no lesson from all 
this? 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



191 



Was it nothing to James that Hamlet, lamenting 
his father, cries out, 

"Yet I, 
A dull and muddy mettled rascal, peak, 
Like John-a-dreams, unpiegnaiit of my cause, 
And can say nothing ; no, not for a King, 
Upon whose property and most dear life 
A damned defeat was made." 

Will it be believed that a plot so personal to him, 
with a moral so pointed and so applicable, was not 
intended for him, or that he took no note of it ; and 
that, with liis eager chase of questions of conscience, 
"motes to the mind's eye," it may not have weighed 
with him to soothe his scruples in patching up an 
alliance with the slayers of his mother? We know, 
as a fact, that while he professed a bittc ndignation, 
he took no action, and accepted the fruits of the 
bloody deed. Doubtless many arguments commended 
themselves to him ; peace, a pension, Protestantism ; 
why not, too, as a case of conscience, the religious 
duty of revenge ? "If thou hast nature in thee bear 
it not," says the Ghost. 

I have now sketched out for you how this great 
drama most probably originated, with some of the 
resemblances of the plot to Darnley's murder. That 
the play had its source in a pohtical pamphlet and grew 
to a world-poem does not at all militate against the 
theory. In my next and last lecture, I will endeavor 
to offer satisfactory evidence, as I believe, that Ham- 
let was at first drawn as a portrait of James VI. of 
Scotland. 



198 THE J'KOTOTVFE OF HAMLET^ 



THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

" If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. 

Merchant of Venice, III., I. 
** No counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life, indeed. 

I Henry IV., V., 4. 

I have in my former lectures, I hope, made clear 
to the minds of my audience the powerful psycholo- 
gical insight with which Shakespeare revealed the 
dark places of a human soul, ai>d that he was able to 
do so because it was with an actual human soul that 
he was dealing. 1 have laid before you some of my 
reasons for believing that I had discovered the indi- 
vidual men upon wliose labyrinthine nature he had 
turned the focal light of his inquiry. In this lecture 
I will adduce further proofs to show that in this 
identification of the archetype, I was not mistaken. 

Suppose we now take this matter de ?iovo, 
unbiassed by any of the great authorities who have 
set out with theories to establish in regard to it. To 
begin at the beginning, Saxo Grammaticus, a writer 
of the twelfth century, gives a rough legend of one 
Amleth, who was in truth a historical character, reg- 
nant in Jutland, toward the close of the sixth century. 
Belleforest, a French writer, printed a version of this 
legend, about 1570, from which it is said a translation 



AND OTJU/.K SI/AK/'.S/'KAh-lAN PROniJ'.M.'i. 1(^3 

was soon afterwards made into JOnjdisli. J^'urncss 
thus describes it : "This prose narrative is a l>ald, 
literal, and, in many respects, uncouth translation." 
The only copy extant was printed in 1608, but it is 
generally believed that the translation itself was made 
soon after the original book was printed 1570. Collier 
characterizes this production thus: (Ibid p. 88,) "It 
will be found that the tragedy varies in many import- 
ant particulars from the novel, especially towards the 
conclusion ; that nearly the whole conduct of the 
story is different 5 that the catastrophe is totally dis- 
similar, and that the character of the hero ni the prose 
narrative is utterly degraded below the rank he is 
entitled to take in the commencement. The murder 
of Hamlet's father, the marriage of his mother with 
the murderer, Hamlet's pretended madness, his inter- 
view with his mother, and his voyage to England, 
are nearly the only points in common." It is, indeed, 
ably contended by Elze, in which Furness agrees 
with him, that the prose history of Hamlet in English 
was of later date than the first sketch of the play. 
In my opinion, while this is true, at least of the version 
in the edition of 1608, it is not a matter of great con- 
sequence. The playwright, whoever he was, that 
conceived the first sketch of Hamlet, was after all 
indebted to the legend, in whatever form he learned 
it, for but the merest outline of the action and situa- 
tions, nothing for the language, nothing for the char- 
acterization, nothing for the motive, the rational 
causes, that lead to the catastrophe. Capell says 
(p. 87) " It is rather strange that none of the relatcr's 
expressions have got into the play," except when 

13 



1 94 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

Hamlet cries out, "A rat, a rat," which is not in 
Belleforest, and was probably taken from the play, 
in the later editions of the translation. The same 
may be said of Hamlet's reproaches to his mother. 
In nought else does the diction of the two produc- 
tions conform. Again, nothing could be more unlike 
than the characters. In the legend, the persons of 
the drama are vikings, who wade red-handed through 
blood, striking straight at the throats of their antag- 
onists. Their stratagems are the clumsy ambuscades 
of half savage warriors. But this rude limning has 
been filled in by a master hand in the play, and is 
supplemented by the craftiest finesse in action and the 
subtlest speculation in thought. And so of the motive ; 
in the legend, revenge and a throne are the stakes, 
and the action is a combat of broadswords and shields ; 
in the tragedy, an intellectual mastery — a triumph in 
statecraft — seems the aim, waged by a practice of 
poisoned foils, a play of rapiers between masters of 
fence. It appears more than probable that some 
reader of Belleforest's French Chronicle, or perhaps 
of the English translation, had given an oral outline 
sketch of the legend of Hamlet to the playwright — 
the unknown playwright whom I have identified 
with Shakespeare, and who first called into being this 
unique work of genius. 

Let us see ho.w near the two stories approach each 
other. In the old legend, King Rorik of Denmark 
has a daughter, Geruth, or Gertrude, whom he marries 
to Horvendile, one of his "valiant, warlike lords." 
When Rorik dies, Horvendile becomes King, as is 
evident, in right of his wife, the Queen, heiress of 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 195 

Rorik. His brother Fengon murders him, and he 
too, marrying the widow, becomes king by the same 
title, with the consent of the realm. It was by his 
marriage with Queen Mary that Darnley got his titfe, 
"King Henry"; and it was thus that his murderer, 
Bothwell, hoped to mount the throne. 

It has always been a mooted question, both in the 
play and in Darnley's taking off, whether the Queen 
were an accessory before or after the fact ; but cer- 
tainly, in both cases, in a brief three months she 
married with the murderer. Indeed, the coincidence 
in time is significant. Hamlet cries out, 

'' Scarce two months dead, etc." 

And again, "Look you how cheerfully my mother 
looks, and my father died within these two hours " ; 
•to whom Ophelia, "Nay, 'tis twice two months, my 
lord:" and in his Soliloquy (Acti, Sc. 2), "but two 
months dead, nay, not so much as two ; " and yet 
again, ' ' Nay, not a month. " Darnley was assassinated, 
February loth by Bothwell, who married Queen 
Mary, May 14th. Hamlet's expressions are inten- 
tionally extravagant ; Ophelia's, deprecatory. To- 
gether, they emphasize the essential point, the in- 
decent haste of the nuptials. 

When we come to consider the death of Darnley, 
and the relations of Mary and Bothwell, we cannot 
fail to be struck by the wonderful similarity of the 
situations. Darnley, with all the intrinsic baseness of 
his nature, was yet a prince of royal lineage and one 
of the handsomest men of his time, and was espe- 
cially noted for his splendid presence ; he was nearly 



196 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

seven feet in height. Mary is said to have conceived 
a violent passion for him, which a short matrimonial 
experience converted into an intense hatred. It vi^as 
not to the purpose of the poet to indicate how ill 
deserved was the love and how well merited was the 
hatred. But it was believed, whether true or not, 
that Mary's relations with Bothwell, before Darnley's 
death, were criminal. There can be no doubt that 
Bothwell murdered him, and that Mary married 
Bothwell scarcely three months thereafter. Her 
apologists alleged that her marriage was under duress; 
but the appearances, at least, were against her, and 
the marriage was in open day, and of its date we 
can have no doubt. The poet did not in Hamlet 
clearly define his view as to whether the Queen was 
an accomplice before the fact, or not. It was neither 
necessary nor prudent to enter on that discussion. 

Shakespeare points to the beauty of the lawful 
husband, and the contrast with his murderer more 
than once : 

" See, what a grace was seated on his brow ; 
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself. 
An eye like Mars to threaten and command ; 
A station like the herald Mercury 
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill ; 
A combination and a form indeed, 
Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
To give the world assurance of a man ; 
This was your husband." 

" Look you now, what follows : 
Here is yoiu- husband, like a mildewed ear, 
Blasting his wholesome brother.' ' 

Hamlet in melancholy mood points the contrast, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



197 



" Hyperion to a satyr, " which suggests the rugged 
adventurer who had murdered " King Henry" ; and 
he recalls Mary's transient, yet doting, passion for 
Darnley : 

'= Heaven and earth ! 
Must I remember ? Why she would hang on him, 
As if increase of appetite had grown 
By what it fed on ; and yet within a month — " 

And here may be noted the influence of the tenure 
of the royal title upon the mind of Hamlet, as con- 
ceived by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which 
was quite different from the view taken of it by most 
of the commentators at the present day. It is now 
nearly always assumed that Claudius was a mere 
usurper, and that it was veriest imbecility in Hamlet 
to hesitate to strike down the wretch who had robbed 
him of his lawful inheritance. But such was not 
actually the case. In the legend, and presumably in 
the play, the Queen was as veritably sovereign as 
Victoria now is ; and Hamlet had no rights while 
she lived. Claudius, too, as King-Consort, was the 
legitimate monarch. He styles Gertrude, 
" Our sometime sister now our queen, 
The imperial jointress to this warlike state." * 

No note of insurrection, revolt, opposition, or 
even protest, is recorded of Hamlet, or the Court, or 
nation, against his accession. 

* Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon defines ''jointress" here as 
''a dowager", which is substantially the meaning; a jointure 
being an estate in lieu of dower. The idea involved is that she 
was sovereign of Denmark by right after her first husband's 
death, and not, as it is sometimes interpreted, joint- tenant, or 
sharer, of the throne with Claudius. 



198 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

Inheritance of the throne by assent, as well as by 
consent, was not unknown to the English constitution. 
Indeed, assent is a tacit and implied consent, which 
was generally procured as the ratification, and not 
as the origin, of the title. 

True, Hamlet calls Claudius, 

'' A cut purse of the empire and the rule, 
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole 
And put it in his pocket. (Ill, 4, 100). 

But this properly refers to the crime with which he 
paved his way to the throne, and which tainted a 
good title ; just as Richard III.'s legitimate accession 
to the throne was vitiated by the murder of his 
nephews. Claudius announces Hamlet as his heir, 
and the courtier Rosencrantz considers his prospect 
for the succession "as advancement." There were 
many aspirants to the hand of Mary after the deaths 
of Darnley and Bothwell, and these all expected to 
share the throne with her. 

With the transmission of the crown by royal 
bequest, the English Nation was also quite familiar. 
Henry VIIL was in the habit of giving it away by 
testament. Edward VI. also tried to do so. Elizabeth 
later confirmed James I.'s legitimate title by an alleged 
"dying voice." In the play, Hamlet exclaims : 

" I cannot live to hear the news from England. 
But I do prophecy the election lights on Fortinbras : 
he has my dying voice." This is doubtless an im- 
plication of some suzerainty in England, but it points, 
at least, to the looseness of the hereditary principle 
in early English history, of which there were so 
many precedents ; as, for instance, William Rufus, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 199 

Henry I,, Stephen, John, Henry IV., Richard HI. and 
Henry VH. 

The title of Claudius to the throne was good 
enough, if it had not been based upon treason, adul- 
tery and murder. Hamlet was still heir-apparent to 
the throne, to which he could look forward also as 
"the most immediate to our throne," by the adoption 
and declaration of Claudius. It was a hard dilemma in 
which he was placed, for as the ghost could not be pro- 
duced in court, to accuse Claudius of an improbable 
crime and there was no writ that ran into Purgatory, 
if Hamlet killed the king he would have stood con- 
victed of quasi-parricide, and of regicide, and would 
have achieved infamy, instead of the crown. Werner, 
Corson, and others rely upon this to prove that 
Hamlet was not irresolute ; but a resolute man is one 
who is equal to arduous occasions, not merely to 
easy ones. 

This matter of regicide was "a living issue "at 
that day. The fall of kings and the mighty ones of 
earth was just then a common subject for men's 
thoughts, to which Sackville's grand poem had led 
the way. Macbeth and Lear and' Shakespeare's 
historic cycle sound all the changes of the imperial 
theme. But here is a goodly king done to his death 
by the treasonable guile of a foul upstart, and his 
cherished wife consenting to the atrocious crime and 
raising the assassin to share her bed and throne. 
What should the princely heir in such case do, warned, 
or not, by visions from beyond the grave.? His 
father's ghost bids him, " Revenge." His own faint 



200 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

heart holds him ever back. Ke is not to touch His 
mother's form, but to wring her heart. 

Could he listen unmoved to the self-reproach of his 
own "counterfeit presentment," pointing out revenge 
as the path of duty .-' 

" How all occasions inform against me, 
And spur my dull revenge 

How stand I then, 
That have a father killed, a mother stained, 
Excitements of my reason and my blood. 
And let all sleep ? 

O, from this time forth, 
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth." 

But if he refuses his mission, and inflict not justice 
upon the murderer, if he leave not the guilty queen 
to the vengeance of heaven, or her enemies, then — ■ 
then — on him, on all, shall fall the wrath of an out- 
raged deity, and the divine Nemesis will overwhelm 
the fated house in one universal wreck. The lesson 
of Hamlet is not against indecision in minor matters, 
but for boldness and resolution in the most momen- 
tous issues, and under the most difficult and trying 
circumstances. The object is not to exhibit the fail- 
ure of a feeble will, but to show that Fate demands 
as an adversary whom she will respect a Will ade- 
quate to any possible human conditions. "Human 
fortitude should be equal to human adversity." It is 
hardly possible that such a lesson and warning would 
fall without effect either upon the Court or the injured 
prince : — and who was there to pity that most seem- 
ing guilty queen ? 

How much of Hamlet is James or portraiture, how 



• 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 201 

much Shakespeare or spiritual projection, it would be 
be hard to estimate. This was the age of dramatic 
incubation ; and from the germ of that precocious 
Blood-Tragedy, "Hamlet, Revenge!", a political 
pamphlet in intention, grew an immortal poem. But it 
was the action, not the speculation which ten years 
later was introduced into it, that made it sud- 
denly the target of envious rivals, a favorite at Court, 
and one of the author's chief stepping-stones to for- 
tune and fame. 

What could be more natural than that the son of 
murdered Darnley should stand as prototype for the 
son of murdered Denmark.? And, if our surmise be 
correct, that the lesson was for James, what more 
effective way could be devised than to point the moral 
in the principal person of the Drama ? But, in stating 
this hypothesis, I have been often met with the 
exclamation, "But how unlike are Hamlet and 
James in character ! " ; to which my reply is, " How 
like ! " Let us see if this can be made good. 

In looking at the character of James, we must not 
regard him with the eyes of Sir Walter Scott, who 
portrayed him in his debauched old age, nor even as 
he appeared to contemporaries after drunkenness and 
craft and cowardly cruelty and vicious indulgence 
had done their perfect work in him, 

Scott follows Sir Antony Weldon, who thus 
describes him long after the date of Hamlet, and 
when he had become king of England. 

"James I. was of a middle stature, more corpulent 
through (z'e., by means of) his clothes than his body, 
yet fat enough. His legs were very weak, having 



202 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

had, as was thought, some foul play in his youth, or 
rather before he was born, so that he was not able 
to stand at seven years of age. That weakness 
made him ever leaning on other men's shoulders. 
His walk was ever circular." 

We are reminded in this description of the allusion 
to Hamlet, by the Queen ; ' ' He's fat and scant o' 
breath. " 

Scott, in the fortunes of Nigel, gives the following 
as his own estimate of James : " He was deeply 
learned, without possessing useful knowledge ; saga- 
cious in many individual cases, without having real 
wisdom ; fond of his power, and desirous to maintain 
and augment it, yet willing to resign the direction of 
that, and of himself, to the most unworthy favorites ; 
a big and bold asserter of his rights in words, yet 
one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds ; a 
lover of negotiations, in which he was always out- 
witted ; and one who feared war, where conquest 
might have been easy. He was fond of his dignity, 
while he was perpetually degrading it by undue famil- 
iarity; capable of much public labor, yet often neg- 
lecting it for the meanest amusement ; a wit, though 
a pedant ; and a scholar, though fond of the con- 
versation of the ignorant and uneducated. Even his 
timidity of temper was not uniform ; and there were 
moments of his life, and those critical, in which he 
showed the spirit of his ancestors. He was laborious 
in trifles, and a trifler where serious labor was re- 
quired ; devout in his sentiments, and yet too often 
profane in his language ; just and beneficent by 
nature, he yet gave way to the iniquities and oppres- 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 203 

sion of others. He was penurious respecting money 
which he had to give from his own hand, yet incon- 
siderately and unboundedly profuse of that which he 
did not see. In a word, those good qualities which 
displayed themselves in particular cases and oc- 
casions, were not of a nature sufficiently firm and 
comprehensive to regulate his general conduct ; and, 
showing themselves, as they occasionally did, only 
entitled James to the character bestowed on him by 
Sully— that he was the wisest fool in Christendom." 
(Fortunes of Nigel, Vol. i, p. 89). This is James 
indeed, but it is not all of James. At this very period 
of his life, he was able to make a far more favorable 
impression on quick-witted and practiced diploma- 
tists ; and I can say this, though I hold the entire 
breed of Royal Stuarts in profound disgust. 

Corvero, the Venetian Ambassador, in 1609, de- 
scribes James I. , then 43 years of age, as "of moderate 
height, of a very good complexion, of an agreeable 
presence, and of a very robust constitution, which 
he endeavors to preserve in its vigor. He ardently 
loves hunting, etc." "He knows how to exercise the 
art of reigning, and is endowed with an excellent 
understanding and extraordinary learning, having 
earnestly applied himself to study during his youth, 
but now he has entirely abandoned it." "He is very 
gentle, an enemy to cruelty, a lover of justice and 
full of good will." "He loves tranquillity, peace and 
repose; he has no inchnation for war." (Rye's Eng- 
land as seen by Foreigners,, pp. 229, 230). This 
vein of hatred of strife, except the war of words, runs 
all through the character of Hamlet. 



204 ^^-^ PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

Bishop Hackett, in his Life of Lord Keeper Williams 
(fol. 693, p. 38) says : "The King's (James I.) table 
was a trial of wits. The reading of some books 
before him was very frequent while he was at his 
repast. He was ever in chase after some disputable 
doubts, which he would wind and turn about with 
the most stabbing objections that ever I heard; and 
was as pleasant and fellow-like in all those discourses, 
as with his huntsmen in the field." (Idem, p. 277). 
This brings to mind Hamlet's wonderful word-play 
with Polonius and the courtiers, and with his dear 
friend Horatio. 

I desire not to lay too much stress on minute resem- 
blances, but one can scarcely help finding in these 
characterizations a likeness to Hamlet : "Sagacious 
in many individual cases, without having real wis- 
dom," "a big and bold asserter of his rights in words, 
yet one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds," 
"a lover of negotiations," "a wit though a pedant, 
and a scholar though fond of the conversation of the 
ignorant and uneducated," "even the timidity of his 
temper was not uniform, and there were moments of 
his life, and those critical, in which he showed the 
spirit of his ancestors." 

Is not this the student from Wittenberg, scintillat- 
ing, versatile, eloquent, infirm of purpose, jesting 
with fops and grave-diggers, who would not, or could 
not, put to the test his uncertain title to the throne, 
yet in a moment of supreme peril and agony executed 
dire vengeance on his murderous enemy, as did 
James, justly or unjustly, on Gowrie.? But Shake- 
speare did not see James VI. of Scotland at twenty 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



205 



or even at thirty years old, as Scott saw him two 
centuries later. In their primy youth, all the Stuarts, 
mean as they were, had a certain beauty and glamour 
full of a promise which was as surely blasted by the 
secret canker of hereditary perfidy. James I. was 
not without it. A prig and a pedant doubtless he 
was, even before he came to man's estate, still the 
eyes of loyalty beheld in him a youthful Solomon. 
He was a student, well informed, one might say 
learned, fit to have been at Wittenberg, or elsewhere, 
with Hamlet, or as Hamlet. He wrote books. He 
had, too, a certain sort of wit of his own, compounded 
of drollery to the limit of buffoonery, word-dialectics, 
and a native shrewdness that was truly Scotch. Full 
of foolery, he was by no means a fool ; and over- 
flowing with sententious words of wisdom, he was 
yet the least wise of men. All the Stuarts, in a man- 
ner, realized the epigram on Charles U, 

" Whose word no man relies on, 
Who never said a fooHsh thing, 
And never did a wise one." 

It will be remembered that James prided himself 
upon his "state-craft", by which he meant crooked 
counsels to compass infamous designs. His full- 
blown treachery was not as yet known of men, for 
in his youth he was only an apt neophyte in i6th 
century king-craft But his foxy cunning and ready 
falsity were already cropping out. The Scotch 
Council knew him, Burleigh knew him, Elizabeth 
probably knew him ; but, in the eyes of the great 
world, he was still the Heir Presumptive, the Coming 
Man, To courtiers, actors, authors, he appeared 



2o6 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

peaceable, not turbulent, gracious, fond of learning 
and literature, the patron of men of letters, a very 
Augustus but for his poverty, a prince held under a 
hard constraint of fortune by a rebellious nobility 
and the haughty domination of England. What a 
study he must have been to those psychologists, the 
politicians and the playwriters. What possibilities 
are in him, this sagacious stripling of twenty, intent 
to exalt and aggrandize his royal state, and yet so 
self-indulgent ! And this vacillation of his — is it 
cowardly wavering and congenital faint-heartedness, 
the fruit of Rizzio's fatal ending, or is it the quintes- 
sence of a tortuous policy ? Who shall say ? But, 
whatever it be, it is the canker that threatens a brood 
of future ills to the state, the people, and the royal 
house. So much we may say now, looking back- 
ward, and so much may have been plain to a Mait- 
land of Lethington, a Burleigh, a Walsingham, and 
even to the eye of the youthful seer, who read so 
truly the secrets of human hearts. To the young 
enthusiasts of England, James was indeed the Com- 
ing Man ; and to a loyalist and conservative, such as 
Shakespeare, he might well stand for Ophelia's por- 
trait of the Prince :. 

« " The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword. 
The expectancy and rose of the fair state." 

How great potentialities of good and evil lay enfolded 
in such a character. What prospects, expectations, 
predictions strewed his path. And it was, seeing 
these, that the tragedy proved to be a prophecy, in- 
stead of a warning, to the vacillating and fated house 
of Stuart. 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 207 

" Such may be the character of James I," says the 
Hamlet-loving Shakespearian, "But surely you do 
not mean to compare the noble Dane to this perverse 
and crooked King, even when you make the best of 
him ? " Bearing in mind that the James and the 
Hamlet of 1587 were not the same as a decade later, 
we may still answer, " yes ! " The grand soliloquies 
belong to the Hamlet of 1597 not to the Hamlet of 
1587 : and, to paraphrase Dun Scotus, the difference 
between Scot and sot was, indeed, merely the interval 
between Prince and King. Much as Hamlet may 
enter into our secret moods, commend himself to our 
metaphysical introspection, and interest us in his per- 
sonal fortunes, still he is just this creature that we 
have described James to be, only magnified by 
Shakespeare's loyalty, interpenetrated by Shake- 
speare's personality, and idealized by Shakespeare's 
genius. Shakespeare did not portray unmixed types, 
but men. It was because he had a man before his 
mind's eye, that in Hamlet he painted a man ; and 
because this Hamlet is a man true to nature, that, in 
this truth to nature, he is full of sub tie contradictions. 
This, indeed, it is that endows him with so profound 
an interest to us, because, in this waywardness of 
spirit, we see ourselves. 

And just here may I be allowed to ask the question 
whether the creation of an ideal organic man in 
fiction, 

"One of the few, the immortal names 
That were not born to die," 

is possible without an actual archetype in real life } 
To me it seems that any particular effort by analysis 



2o8 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

and synthesis to build up an imaginary man must 
inevitably result in a puppet, or a Frankenstein, or, 
as the highest achievement of such art, in a literary 
picture or statue. Now, we all feel that there is in 
Shakespeare's characters, in Hamlet especially, who 
is now under our observation, something different 
from this. We feel that he is a real man, whose heart 
we see beating against his ribs, whose inarticulate 
sobs reach us, as well as his cries of protest against 
the disorder in the universe. Why is this so ? We 
can lend ourselves easily enough to the illusion of the 
stage when it portrays the humors of men, under the 
masterly hand of Ben Jonson or Sheridan ; but we 
know the difference. If Claudius were, indeed, "a 
king of shreds and patches," he would long ere this 
have been consigned to the lumber room. When 
Hamlet steps upon the stage, we feel that, this is not 
mere acting. He is a resurrection, not a reconstruc- 
tion. Under that inky robe a living spirit dwells. He 
is perennial, immortal, because he did once live. If 
an actual man had not stood as the pattern of that 
lofty dreamer, if Prince Hamlet were merely the 
coinage of the poet's brain, not the portraiture of an 
individual man, then long since he would have been 
but potsherds, the broken crystals of a vase, of which 
the intrinsic form was lost in pervasive space. If I 
am asked whether prototypes existed of Romeo, Fal- 
staff, Hotspur, Shylock, Prospero, Lear, Macbeth, 
Othello, and all that goodly company, from whose 
actual, living lineaments the artist painted these 
wonderful portraits, I answer, 'yes.' Who they were 
I cannot now say, but I think I can tell you who stood 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 209 

with brooding brow, while Shakespeare drew " the 
dejected, 'havior of his visage." It was the young 
King James of Scotland, who has written in his tab- 
lets, "Remember thee ! Ay, thou poor ghost, while 
memory holds a seat in this distracted globe ; " and 
again, " O, most pernicious woman ! ", and last of all, 
"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain ! " 

While I may not permit myself to be drawn aside 
into a too elaborate discussion of this question, I feel 
that an answer is due to those who shall object that 
artistic creation is the realization of an ideal, and not 
mere extrinsic photography. This is true ; but an 
ideal is not a conglomeration of qualities, or an adjust- 
ment of parts brought together from hither and yon ; 
it is essentially portraiture. For portraiture is the 
representation of an organism under the conditions in 
which it is viewed by the mind of the artist. We 
cannot say that the picture, or the dramatic character, 
is the absolute copy of the model. It is the semblance 
of the model as the artist beholds it, or as he chooses 
to behold it ; as it is, or as he feels it should be ; and 
as the first is his image of it, so the last is his ideal. 
But the ideal is but the image with something of the 
artist put into it ; a modification merely, not a com- 
plete creation, not a literary fabric. So, as I conceive 
Hamlet to hav^been written, Shakespeare made him, 
at first, perhaps altogether James, but, as his own soul 
and reason entered more and more into the contem- 
plation and evolution of this favorite character, 
Hamlet grew in speculation, if not in character, with 
each touch, more like the player and less like the 
Prince, and hence nobler and grander ever. 

14 



2 1 o THE PR O TO TYPE OF HAMLE T. 

If we do not assume Hamlet to be a perfect char- 
acter, (being so like ourselves, as we all imagine), 
but take him up, and examine his record, as we may- 
say, we shall discover more than ordinary blemishes, 
indeed acts that disclose radical defects. I am not 
disposed to take so extreme a view of the case as was 
propounded to me by a distinguished statesman of 
Kentucky. "My theory of Hamlet," said he, "is 
that he was a rascal, sir ; a scoundrel, sir. He was 
a villain, and deserved the penitentiary, if, indeed, 
not the gallows. His treatment of Ophelia ought to 
have outlawed him. No gentleman would speak to 
a lady as he did, much less desert her as he did. 
Think, too, of that scoundrelly trick on Rosencrantz 
and Guildenstern. Would a man "of honor put up a 
job like that.? And as for his courage — -why, the 
whole thing shows that he took it all out in talk. He 
wouldn't fight." This may be thought rather harsh 
judgment; but, certainly, in all of Hamlet's projects, 
plots, indirections, outbursts of rage, hesitations, 
quibblings with conscience, vengeance in words and 
wavering in deeds, profound philosophy and paltry 
action, we may find a likeness .to the Royal Solomon. 
There are people who find Macbeth a modest gentle- 
man, and Hamlet a heroic, resolute, direct man ; but 
such is not the verdict of common-sense. His affec- 
tation of madness, his tortuous conduct with Ophelia, 
his conceit that "he play's the thing, 

"Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King," 
his counterplot, when "benetted round with vil- 
lainies," for the destruction of Rosencrantz and Guil- 
denstern, his determination to slay the King and his 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 21 1 

wasted opportunity, evince a faint heart, an unready- 
hand and a wavering will. We seem to behold 
Gowrie entrapped and slain ; Sir Thomas Overbury 
perishing in prison, "between the pass and fell 
incensed points of mighty opposites ; " and Raleigh 
lingering in a dungeon and dying on the scaffold for 
too faithful service. Indeed, even in such minor 
details as his contempt for female love and his entire 
trust in his favorite Horatio, we may discover in 
Hamlet a likeness to James, who disliked women, 
neglected his queen, and lavished an overweening 
fondness on his male favorites. 

A very strong contrast might be drawn, it is true, 
between the formality of James' mind, and the lofty 
imagination and profound speculation of Hamlet ; 
but it must be borne in mind that Buchanan — good 
schoolmaster, man of great talents, — made James, 
(what there was of him), and that Shakespeare made 
Hamlet. Shakespeare portrayed James as Hamlet ; 
but into that earthen vessel he threw the sublime 
light of his own genius until the vase becomes trans- 
lucent as crystal. This is the endowment of genius. 
It is thus that the artist will paint Caesar Borgia with 
a Satanic beauty, and Milton will plant upon the 
brow of the foul fiend himself the majesty of an un- 
conquerable pride. 

There arc some very striking evidences in the play 
itself confirmatory of the view that the prototype of 
Hamlet was a real person, not a fictitious one, and 
that this person was King James of Scotland. In 
the accepted version of the drama, based upon the 
Second Quarto, Hamlet is clearly stated to be thirty 



2 1 2 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

years old. In the grave-digger scene (Act. V. S. i), 
occurs the following conversation : 

Hamlet. How long hast thou been a grave-maker ? 

First down. Of all the days in the year 
I came to"t that day that our last 
King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras. 

Hamlet. How long is that since ? 

First clown. Cannot you tell that ? Every fool can tell that. 
It was the very day that young Hamlet was born.... I have 
been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." 

Hamlet recollected well, 'Poor Yorick,' whose 
"Skull now hath lain you, i' the earth three and 
twenty years," as the grave-digger tells us. 

Hamlet says, "Alas, poor Yorick ! I knew him, 
Horatio ; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent 
fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand 
times, etc." This would suit very well the jester's 
play with a boy of six or seven. Since then three 
and twenty years have passed, and now he is thirty. 
This all seems sufficiently explicit, even if we neglect 
the Queen's comment on his fencing, "He's fat and 
scant of breath ;" a sentence which, by-the-bye, does 
not occur in Q i, as it would not have been true of 
James at twenty, when the first play was written. 
The prototype had grown stout, as well as ten years 
older, in the interim between the first cast of the 
play, and the last version. It seems evident, there- 
fore, that, for some purpose, the poet fixes the age of 
Hamlet at thirty. If this play were revised, or, as 
we should rather say, rewritten, in 1596, as we have 
shown to be probable, Hamlet was then just the 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 



213 



same age with James, who was born in 1566. 

But to represent Hamlet as thirty years old creates 
a very serious discrepancy in the play, which the 
critics have not been able satisfactorily to account 
for. Blackstone says, "The poet in the fifth act had 
forgot what he wrote in the first. '' In all the earliest 
parts of the play, Hamlet appears to us, indeed, as 
in the first flower of youth. The very first allusion 
to him is as " young Hamlet." 

Laertes (Act. i, Sc. 3), speaks of Hamlet's love for 
Ophelia thus, 

" For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, 
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood, 
A violet in Ha&youth oiprimy nature." 

This toy in blood, i.e. caprice of impulse, this 
sweet flower of nature's springtime, has no proper 
reference to a man of thirty. 

And Polonius says to her, (Act. i, Sc. 3, v. 123), 

" For Lord Hamlet, 
Believe so much in him that he is young. 
And with a larger tether he may walk 
Than may be given to you." 

This language is only applicable to early youth. 
Indeed, the critics agree, with few exceptions, that 
he was a youth, somewhere between 17 and 21 
years of age. Richard Grant White puts him at 
twenty. He and his companions came back from 
the University of Wittenberg to attend his father's 
funeral, and he proposes to return. And, though it 



214 ^^^ PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

is urged by some who cannot deny the authenticity 
of the text, which makes him thirty, that students of 
that age may be found at the German Universities, 
yet such is not a princely custom now, and less so 
was it in Shakespeare's time, an age of strenuous 
action. 

Furnivall says: "The two parts of the play are 
inconsistent on this main point in Hamlet's state." 
And Halliwell, to reconcile so patent a discrepancy, 
even ventures oonjecturally (or arbitrarily rather), to 
alter the text from "thirty years" to "twenty," and 
from ' ' twenty-three " to a " dozen years. " In this last 
instance he follows the reading of the First Quarto, 
which embodied the earlier Hamlet, written ten 
years before the Revision, contained in the author- 
ized version of Q 2. Such a change gives consistency 
to the action, though not to the character as devel- 
oped in the Second Quarto, where Hamlet's intro- 
spection reveals a larger experience of life than 
belongs to early manhood. Besides, it is an unwar- 
ranted sacrifice of the text, which no critic has a 
right to make. Much of the language and action of 
Hamlet is explicable by supposing him a youth of 
twenty, which would be unworthy of a man of 
thirty. The whole tone of address to him by the 
King and Queen, combining authority and solicitude, 
seems to assume his youth and dependence, and to 
lack that implicit deference, which is almost instinc- 
tively paid to maturity, even in inferiors. Polonius 
patronizes him, and the easy approach of courtier 
friends reveals docility and lack of state. The recon- 
ciliation of these difficulties consists in constantly 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 215 

bearing in mind that Q i regarded a youth of twenty ; 
and that in that earlier version everything is con- 
sistent with that view of him. But when the last 
Hamlet was written, the prototype had become a 
man of thirty, and this fact is so impressed upon 
the author's mind that he says so. But then his 
revision was chiefly by additions and interpolations 
in language and thought, and the changes of fact 
made were of very obvious points. The Second 
Quarto emphasizes the fact that Hamlet is thirty 
years of age, a fact unnecessary to the action ; but it 
neglected to alter the by-play, the minor touches, 
which had in the earlier play pointed to and illus- 
trated his youth. He was left a student, etc. It is 
as if a painter were to re-touch the portrait of a 
maiden, giving her the face of a matron, but leaving 
to her the dress of girlhood, and all the flowers of 
May. The explanation seems to be that in the ear- 
liest version he did have in view a youth of twenty, 
and so painted him ; but when, a decade later, he 
re-wrote the play, as his hero — an actual man — had 
grown ten years older, he stated that fact, he made 
him thirty, he changed "the dozen years" since he 
was a little lad to " three and twenty ; " but, with his 
customary play-house carelessness, he overlooked 
many touches which had marked his youth. In the 
First Quarto the grave-digger says : 

" Looke you heres a skull kath bin here this dozen yeare." 

In the later version he puts it : 

«' Here's a skull now hath lain you i' the earth three and twenty 
years." 

"A dozen " is twelve, but it is not used to signify 



2i6 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET. 

exactness of time, except that it must have been so 
long, at least since Yorick was playfellow of the 
boy Hamlet. Now, in the Second Quarto, Hamlet 
is made thirty years of age, and this "dozen" is 
altered to "twenty-three," indicating that ten or 
eleven years had passed since that first draft of the 
play. In that lapse of time a real character would 
grow just so much older; but a fictitious character, the 
figment of the author's brain, or the creature of an 
old romance, would not have gained a day in age. 
In the mind of his creator, to him would belong a 
perennial youth. Oliver Twist is always young ; 
the fat boy is a boy still. From this it appears that 
whoever might be the prototype of Hamlet, he must 
have been a real person at least, whether James or 
some other ; and the only question is whether any 
other was more likely than James to be such proto- 
type. 

In the First Quarto, in the Interlude, the Player 
King opens his speech to the Queen with the words : 

" Full forty years have passed, their date is gone, 
Since happy time joined both our hearts as one, etc." 

The "forty years" have here no special signif- 
icance, except to indicate the special atrocity of the 
murder. . But in the Second Quarto, the King's speech 
is altered, and lines inferior in melody and vigor, but 
more explicit, are substituted : 

" Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round 
Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground ; 
And thirty dozen 77100ns, with borrowed sheen, 
About the world have times twelve thirties been, 
Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands 
Unite, commutual in most sacred bands." 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN- PROBLEMS. 217 

Why this change ? Is it not evident that it is to 
conform in general terms to the age assigned to 
Hamlet by the Grave-digger, to his thirty years when 
the play was recast ! 

When Shakespeare made this play, notable people 
sat for their portraits, and, when the gallery was 
finished, many had been the touch by which he had 
transformed the evanescent figures of the Court into 
immortals, beings more real, more historical than the 
originals. I have read a good deal of criticism on 
Hamlet, but nowhere have I seen the character of 
Polonius better portrayed than by Goethe. The gift 
of genius, insight, seeing through shams the "naked 
frailties " of the soul, enabled him to account this 
typical courtier at his true value. It is this gift, 
which at a later day so endeared the large-hearted 
Thackeray to us. Shakespeare meant to portray some 
particular personage when he put Polonius on the 
the stage. Who was this grave and reverend cham- 
berlain, with his wise saws, his apt allusions, his 
worldly wisdom and his spiritual blindness.? Here 
is a problem not yet solved. Was it Burleigh or Sir 
Nicholas Throckmorton, or some lesser wight, who 
had offended the players or their patron .? Who can 
tell ? When a consensus of critics accepts James as 
Hamlet, I will unriddle the rest of it. Wilhelm 
Meister loquitur : 

"I engage," said he, "on this occasion, to present 
a meritorious person in his best aspect. The repose 
and security of this old gentleman, his emptiness and 
his significance, his exterior gracefulness and interior 
meanness, his frankness and sycophancy, his sincere 



2 1 8 THE PRO TO TYPE OF HAMLE T, 

roguery and deceitful truth, I will introduce with all 
due elegance in their fit proportions. This respect- 
able, gray-haired, enduring, time-serving knave, I 
will represent in the most courtly style ; the 
occasional roughness and coarseness of our author's 
strokes will further me here. I will speak like a 
book when I am prepared beforehand, and like an 
ass when I utter the overflowings of my heart. I 
will be insipid and absurd enough to chime in 
with everyone, and acute enough never to observe 
when people make a mock of me. I have seldom 
taken up a part with so much zeal and roguish- 
ness." 

Wilhelm had also allowed both Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern to continue in his play. "Why not 
compress them into one ? " said Serlo. "This 
abbreviation will not cost you much." 

" Heaven keep me from all such curtailments!" 
answered Wilhelm : " They destroy at once the 
sense and the effect. What these two persons are, 
and do, it is impossible to represent by one. In 
such small matters we discover Shakespeare's great- 
ness. These soft approaches, this smirking and 
bowing, this assenting, wheedling, flattering, this 
whisking agility, this wagging of the tail, this allness 
and emptiness, this legal knavery, this ineptitude 
and insipidity, — how can they be expressed by a 
single man ? There ought to be at least a dozen of 
these people, if they could be had ; for it is only in 
society that they are anything ; they are society 
itself ; and Shakespeare showed no little wisdom and 
discernment in bringing in a pair of them. Besides, 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 219 

I need them as a couple that may be contrasted with 
the single, noble, excellent Horatio, " 

When Bothwell was captured in 1567, he was taken 
before Eric Rosencrantz, Governor of Bergen, who 
sent him to the king of Denmark. In 1576 Bothwell 
died in prison in Denmark, and Mary and her friends 
claimed that he made a confession, exculpating her 
from all share in her husband's murder. The genuine- 
ness of the confession was denied, and Mary prayed 
that an appeal be made to the witnesses, among whom 
was one "M. Gullanstarn," as she spelt it. The coin- 
cidence with the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of 
Hamlet is curious. The latter name, though of the 
ancient nobility, has often been dishonored. 

Shakespeare did not neglect another aspect of the 
courtier in Osric ; and even Laertes presented features 
often seen in the train of " Good Queen Bess." 

Too much stress ought not, perhaps, to be laid 
upon Ophelia's eulogy of " the beauteous Majesty of 
Denmark," a proper tribute to Queen Mary in 1586, at 
forty-four, and still more so at the time of Darnley's 
murder, but a strained compliment to the mother of 
a man of thirty, whose over-ripe charms would 
scarcely have stirred to fratricide "that adulterate 
beast," who seemed to have sought, through guilt, 
the woman as much as the Queen. 

Froude says of her in regard to Babington's 
Conspiracy : "She was the old Mary Stuart still, the 
same bold, restless, unscrupulous, ambitious woman, 
and burning with the same passions, among which, 
revenge stood out prominent. Hers was the panther's 
nature — graceful, beautiful, malignant, untamable. 
What was to be done with her .? " Perhaps, we 
ought all to thank. God that she has been dead so 



2 20 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

many centuries before we were born, and pray to 
God that there may be few left like her. 

It has seemed to me (am I led by the phantom of 
the Scottish sorceress ?) that in the Play of Hamlet 
not enough is made of the Queen. She was one to 
breed all evil passions in the heart of man, and to 
gild them with the fascination of an irresistible 
beauty, an architect of ruin, a sure guide to moral 
anarchy. To me she seems portrayed in Swinburne's 
apostrophe to Queen Mary : 

*' Love hangs like light about yoiir name, 
As music round the shell ; 
No heart can take of you a tame 
Farewell. 

Yet when your very face was seen, 

111 gifts were yours for giving : 
Love gat strange guerdons of my queen 

When living. 

O diamond heart, unflawed and clear. 
The whole world's crowning jewel ! 

Was ever heart so deadly dear, 
So cruel? " 

Problems are sometimes started which are not easy 
to solve. On the theory that the vizard of Hamlet 
covered the face of James, a latent threat seems 
suggested in Fortinbras' claim, that he had "some 
rights of memory to this Kingdome. " What princely 
soldier, "fresh from conquest, "might answer to this 
young hero's unchallenged usurpation 1 Could it be 
Essex? Hardly in 1586-7, though the phrase may 
have come into the play at a later day. Could it be a 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 221 

covert compliment to the plausible and poisonous 
Leicester, who posed as patron of Puritan and play- 
actor aHke ? Have Hamlet's dying words any 
significance in them beyond the sound? 

" I cannot live to hear the news from England ; 
But I do prophecy the election lights 
On Fortinbras : he has my dying voice." 

If the royal line failed, it was England which 
would settle the succession on a prince alien to 
Denmark, i.e. to Scotland. However, both England 
and Scotland were full of Pretenders with small 
pretense of title. 

Now, then, let us go back for a moment, and see 
how this matter stands. In the years 1586 and 1587 
there existed a strong motive on the part of the 
English Government to foment hatred against the 
name and memory of Mary, Queen of Scots. The 
hostility of the Government was but a reflection of 
the national feeling which was intense. It was also 
necessary to embitter the antagonism of James VI. 
of Scotland against his mother as much as possible. 
All the arts of diplomacy were employed for this 
purpose ; spies, go-betweens, subsidies, bribery, 
and whatever fear or flattery or favor could accom- 
plish. It has frequently been a device of courts to 
utilize the stage to accentuate political action. The 
stage at that particular period was largely used to 
enforce personal views and to gratify personal ends. 
Now, at this critical moment, a play appears with a 
plot picked up apparently by accident, but with 
strikingly similar points to the murder of Darnley. 



222 THE PROTOTYPE OF HAMLET, 

It is laid at the Court of Denmark, but all the drapery- 
is more Scotch than Danish. The scenery is of 
Edinburgh, not Elsinore. The drunkenness and de- 
bauchery might attach to one as well as the other. 
The character of the usurping Claudius might well 
have been drawn from that of the ruthless and auda- 
cious Bothwell. And numerous allusions go to establish 
the essential identity of the plots of Hamlet with Darn- 
ley's murder. But, in addition to all this, James and 
Hamlet possess, with all their superficial differences, 
remarkable and radical points of resemblance in char- 
acter. I have endeavored to show that Hamlet must be 
the likeness of a real man. When " Hamlet " was first 
written, in 1586, he was twenty years old, and so was 
James ; when James reached thirty, the play was re- 
written, and, lo ! Hamlet had become thirty also. The 
curious circumstance that he keeps step in years 
with James corroborates the probability that it was 
James who sat for the portrait of Hamlet. 

We find Shakespeare employing Hamlet as his 
mouthpiece, his oracle, the vates into whom he has 
breathed his divine afflatus. Hamlet utters his choic- 
est thoughts, his profoundest suspirations, his most 
perplexed problems of life. But, surely, he did not 
intend to reveal himself fully therein. He propounds 
the riddle, but he does not even hint his own guess 
of its meaning. He is speaking, but it is through 
another ; and M'^hat more exalted spokesman or inter- 
preter could he select than his future King, " I am 
but a player," he says to his soul, "but my thoughts 
are royal thoughts ; my winged words, heaven-born 
. and heaven directed, befit the lips of a king. " So 



AND OTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PROBLEMS. 223 

that, according to my view, we have the poet, like 
an Apollo, standing invisible by the side of his Pytho- 
ness, who utters the voice of inspiration in sentences, 
pregnant though obscure. The body of Hamlet is 
James, but the Divinity who guides the motions of 
his soul is Shakespeare. 

THE END. 



INDEX. 



Abbott's Shakespearian Gram- 
mar, 31. 

Academical Study of Shakes- 
peare, 29. 

Action in Hamlet, The, 78-9, 
99, 102, 152, 158. 

Actors, their status, 146-7, 168. 

Age of transition, 188-9, 190. 

Algebra of the spirit, 53 to ^o. 

Amiel's Journal, 95-6-7-8. 

Among my books, 188-9, 190. 

Analysis of Hamlet. (See Ham- 
let.) 

Anne Hathaway, 74. 

Antony and Cleopatra, 31. 

Apology for quotations, 105. 

Arch of Gervinus, 38. 

Assassination, 50, 169, 178. 

Atheneum, Letter in, 51. 

Attorney's clerk. (See Shakes- 
peare, a Noverint.) 



Bacon, Genius of Lord, 73. 

Baconian paradox, 72-3, 124, 
142-3-4, 160. 

Banquo, 49, 50, 55, 57, 58, 59, 
63, 66. 

Beauties of Shakespeare, 44. 

' Beauteous majesty of Den- 
mark,' 181, 219. 

'Beautified,' 128. 

Belleforest, 179, 194. 

Bierne, 186. 

Biographies of Shakespeare's 
contemporaries, 135 to 139, 
146-7-8. 



Bishop Butler, 164. 

Benedix, 91. 

Blackstone, Sir Wm., 213. 

'Bloody,' 58. 

' Blood-boltered, ' 58. 

Bluntness of Macbeth, 61-2-3. 

Bodenstadt, 58. 

Booth, Edwin, 103. 

Bothwell, 178, 181 -2, 188, 195-6, 

219, 222. 
Boucicault, Dion, 72. 
Brown, Charles Armitage, 117. 
Buchanan, Geo., 211. 
BuUen, 137. 

Bunbury, Sir Henry, 185. 
Burbage, 140, 151. 
Burger's Macbeth, 57. 
Burleigh, Lord, 169, 171, 176, 

179. 205-6, 217. 



C 

Campbell, T., 45. 

Campbell, Lord, 127, 134, 144, 
166, 175. 

Capell, 193, 

Canons of dramatic construc- 
tion, 37, 38, 55, 99, 100, 152. 

Carey, Sir Robert, 173. 

Cartwright, Robert, 144-5. 

Central idea of drama, 37, 55-6. 

Charles II., 205. 

Chateaubriand, 91. 

Chauteauneuf, 170. 

Chettle, 128. 

Chivalry, 30. 

Chronicle Plays, 30. 

Cibber, Colley, 91. 

Clarendon Editors, 26, 31, 107— 
8-9, IIS, "7-8, 157, 177- 



226 



INDEX. 



Claudius, 84, 181, 183, 188, 194, 

197-8-9, 222. 
Coleridge, Hartley, 146-7. 
Coleridge, Samuel T., 43, 7S~ 

6-7, 91, 102. 
Collaboration, 115, 123, 135, 

153- 

Collier, 120, 193. 

Comedy of Errors, 108. 

Commentators , their dogma- 
tism, 25, 28, 160-1. 

Comparison with Bacon, 73-4- 

Conscience, 61. 

Contagion of crime, 59, 63, 65, 

70- 
Contagion of weakness, 87, 95, 

98. 
Contemptuous biography, 143, 

146. 
Contemporary excellence, 124, 

134-5-6-7-8-9. 
Contemporaries, their obsciurity, 

123, 136, 146-7. 
"Conversations in a Studio," 

, 56-7, 85, 155-6. 
Coriolanus, 31. 
Corson, 199. 
Courtiers, 168, 179. 
Corvero, 203. 
Craik's English of Shakespeare, 

3i> 36. 
Crime, Macbeth's, 50. 
Crisis of Hamlet, 87. 
Crisis of tragedy, 38-9. 
Critical ineptitude, 56-7, 67, 

91-2. 
Criticism, Erroneous methods, 

85, 124, i30-i_, 136, 143, 160-1. 
Criticism, Foreign (See Goethe 

and Werder, also), 56-7, 67, 

85, 89, 90, 91-2, 175, 183-4, 

186-7. 
Culture, 41. 

D 

Darnley, Murder of, 173-4-5, 
178 to 185, 191, 195-6-7-8. 



Dates. (See Hamlet.) 

Davies, Sir John, 149. 

Davison, Secretary, 170, 176. 

Delius, 117. 

Delusion of sin, 62, 68, 70. 

Disuse of Quarto First, 109-1 10. 

Denmark, Shakespeare's, 186 to 
190, 222. 

Devonshire Hamlet's, 116. 

Decisiveness, Hamlet's, assert- 
ed, 83-4, 90, 199. 

Defects in plot of Hamlet, 79, 
152. 

Derby, Lord, 161. 

Derby's Iliad, 42. 

Destructive criticism, 124, 130, 
160. 

Dilemma, Hamlet's, 199, 

Disappointment, Shakespeare's, 
148. 

Dogmatism of commentators, 
24, 28, 160-1. 

Drake, 45. 

Drama, The Elizabethan, 20, 

43-4. 

Drama, its poetic, basis, 102. 

Drama, Founder of the Roman- 
tic, 134 to 139, 151-2. 

Dramatic epic, 46. 

Dramatic fecundity, 176. 

Dramatic unities. 37 to 40, 98-9, 

Dregs of sin, 148. 
Drunkenness and debauchery, 

187 to 190, 222. 
Drury, Sir Wm., 178. 
Duncan, 49, 50, 57-8, 60, 63-4, 

66. 
Dyce, 121. 

E 

Early authorship of Shakes- 
peare, 115 to 144, 150, 176- 

7-8. 
Eckardt, 186. 
Edward II, 173 
Elements of genius, 131-2-3, 

ISO. 



INDEX. 



227 



Elsmere, Robert, 95. 
Elsinore, 183, 187, 222. 
Elze, 107, 125, 130, 193. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 160, 162-3-4, 

167, 169, 170, 177. 
Elizabeth's court, 151, 168. 
Elizabeth's council, 167, 169, 

170-1-2-3, 176-7-8, 186. 
Elizabethan age, 53-4-5-6, 163- 

4, 167-8-9. 
Elizabethan drama, 20-1, 43-4. 
EHzabethan dramatists, 43, 124, 

134 to 139, 146-7-8, 176, 186. 
'Encourager of hesitancy,' 186. 
Energy a test of genius, 13 1-2- 

3> ISO- 
Energy of Shakespeare's times, 

163. 
English nationahty, 163, 164. 
♦Enghsh of Shakespeare,' 31, 

36. 
Epic tragedy, Macbeth, 46. 
Essex, 171, 182, 220. 
Esthetic value of Shakespearian 

study, 22-3, 29. 
Ethical value of Shakespearian 

study, 29. 
Evil, Problem of, 58-9, 60. 
Euphuism, 125. 



« Fat and scant of breath,' 212. 
Fate and Free Will, 48, 59, 79, 

82-3, 88, 91-2-3-4, 99, 100, 

157. 165, 190, 200. 
Faust, 93. 

Ficklen, Prof. John R., 20. 
Final touches to Hamlet, 109, 

112, 157-8-9. 
First Folio, 26-7-8-9, 106. 
First Quarto, 107 to 112, 116, 

119,175-6, 185. 
First words of Macbeth, 55. 
Fleay, 113, 115-16, 121-2, 126, 

135-6, 140. 
Folklore, 54. 



Footsteps of Shakespeare, The, 

144. 
Fortier, Prof. A., 20. 
Fortinbras, 220-1 . 
' Fortunes of Nigel,' 202-3. 
Free Will. (See Fate and Free 

Will.) 
FreiHgrath, 90. 
French critics, 91-2. 
Froude, J. A., 34, 91, 170, 219. 
' Frozen Toe, The, ' 89. 
Furness, Variorum, Hamlet, 26, 

89, 180 to 186, 193. 
Furnivall, 214. 

G 

Genius, Elements of, 13 1-2-3, 

150. 
Genius, Inspiration of, 102. 
Genius, Precocity of, 140-1— 2, 

176-7. 
Geography, Ideal, 187. 
German critics. (See Goethe 

and Werder.) 56-7, 67, 85, 

89, 90-1, 175, 183-4, 186-7. 
' Germany in Hamlet, ' 90, 
Gertrude. (See The Queen.) 
Gervinus, 45, 117. 
Gervinus' arch, 38. 
Globe Company, 140. 
Gowrie, Earl, 52. 
Gravedigger, The, 212, 215. 
Greene (Dramatist), 122, 126-7- 

8-9, 135, 151. 
Greene (Actor), 140. 
Gerald Griffin, 141. 
Goethe's inspirations from 

Shakespeare, 75-6-7. 
Goethe's interpretation of Ham- 
let, 79, 80-1-2-3, 93, 98. 
Goethe's "Polonius," 217. 
Goethe's " Rosencrantz and 

Guildenstern, " 218. 
Gonzago Play, The, 85, 121, 

145, 216. 
Guildenstern, 179, 182, 189, 

218-9. 



228 



INDEX, 



" Groat's-worth of Wit, The," 

128. 
Gunpowder Plot, 53. 

H 

Hackett, Bishop, 204. 

Hallam, 45. 

Halliwell, 26, 113, 122, 138, 

143, 214. 
Hamlet the Play. 

Alterations by critics, 91-2. 

Fate and Free Will, 48, 79, 
82-3, 88, 92 to 100, 157, 

165, 190, 200. 

Gonzaga Play, The, 85, 
120-1-2, 145, 216. 
Hamlet^ The First. 

Author, 112 to 119, 120 to 

123, 130^1, 135 to 139, 

142, 152, 177. 
Its date, 112, 115, 125 to 

130, 140-1, 145, 169, 185. 
Notices, 1 12-13, 126 to 129, 

152-3-4, 178. 
" Hamlet Revenge ! " 129, 

151. 177- 
Hamlet of Quarto First, 107-8, 

110-11-12, 116, 119, 175-6, 

185. 
Last Hamlet, The, 106 to 109, 

HI-12, 116, 119, 125, 152 

to 159. 
Lesson of Hamlet, 82-3, 87-8, 

93 to 104, 182, 190. 
Method of production, 151- 

2-3-4- 
Motives for production, 162-3, 

166, 171, 173-4, 178. 
Origin, 116, 123, 142, 151 to 

154, 161, 173-4, 178-9, 180 
192-3. 
Paragon of Plays, The, 37, 

45, 78-9, 152. 

Parallel vv^ith Macbeth, 48, 
78-9, 87, 94-5. 

Parallelisms to Darnley's mur- 
der, 173-4-5, 178 to 185, 
191, 195 to 198. 



Plot, Crisis of, 99. 

Plot, Development of, 48, 151 

to 158, 162. 
Plot, Rudeness of, 79, 152. 
Portraitures in play, 100 to 

104, 183, 201 to 207, 209 to 

211, 222-3. 
. Queen as accessary, 181, 185, 

195-6-7. 
Revenge as a duty, 173, 188- 

9-190-1, 199-200. 
Scene of action, 186, 190. 
Shakespeare's personality in 

Hamlet, 100 to 103, 154 to 

158, 165. 
Sigitificance , Theories of its. 

Author, 94. 

Coleridge, 85-6-7. 

French critics, 91-2. 

German critics, 85, 89-90-1, 

Goethe, 79 to 83, 85. 

Lowell, 87-8, 188-9-90. 

" No Philosopher, " loi. 

Plumptre, 180 to 186. 

Werder, 83-4. 
Value as an acting play, 78-9, 

99, 102, 152, 158. 
Hamlet the Prince. 
Character. 

Alleged madness, 92-3, 1 1 1. 

Craft, 81, 210-II. 

Indecision, 48, 80 to 88, 
93 to 104, 199, 200. 

Introspection, 86 to 89, 94 
to 100, 154-5. 

Learning, 80. 

Melancholy, 100, 154-5-6. 

Pessimism, 154 to 158. 

Skepticism, 100. 

Self-reproach, 101-2, 191. 

Word-Play, 179. 
Characterizations . 

Amiel, 95 to 98. 

Coleridge, 85 to 87. 

Goethe, 80-1-2-3. 

German critics, 89, 90-1. 

Kentucky critic, 210. 

Lowell, 87-8. 



INDEX. 



229 



As an exponent of Shake- 
speare, 100 to 103, 154 to 
158, 165. 

Hamlet, a portrait, loi, 103-4. 

Likeness to James I, 183, 201 
to 207, 209-10-11, 222-3. 

Mirror of all mankind, 10 1, 
157-8-9. 

Organic unity of character, 
98, 99, 100-1-2. 
Hamnet Shakespeare, 119, 125, 

130, 156-7-8. 
Hardihood of Macbeth, 60, 69. 
Hazlitt, 26, 100, 103. 
Heard, F. F., 127, 144. 
Henry IV., 118. 
Henry VI., 108, 119, 128. 
Henry VIII., 30. 
Henslow's Diary, 129. 
Hero and Leander, 136. 
Heroic drama, Macbeth, 46. 
Hesitation. (See Indecision.) 
Hieronymo, 121. 
Histoires tragiques, 179. 
Historical plays, The, 30 to 37. 
Holinshed, 49, 66. 
Holyrood, 183-4, 187. 
How to study Shakespeare. (See 

Lecture I.) 
Hudson, 26, 40. 
Hume, David, 183. 
Hunsdon, Lord, 170-1, 176, 179. 
Hunter (New Illustrations), 184. 
Hypostasis of Thor, 89. 
" Hystorie of Hamblet," 179, 



Ideals, Creation of, 207-8-9. 
Impotence of man, 82. (See 

Fate.) 
Incorrect notion of genius, 121- 

2-3- 
Indecision of Hamlet, 48, 80 to 

88, 93 to 104, 199-200. 
Inhibition of 1597, The, 109, 

112, 119. 
♦'Innovation, The late," 109. 



Interlude, The, 216. 
Introspection, 86 to 89, 94 to 

100, 154-5. 
"Isle of Dogs," 109. 
Isolation of Guilt, 70-1. 



James I. 
Craft, 190. 
Fondness for theatre, 173, 

183. 
Hume's character of James I., 

183. 
Indecision, 172, 182, 185, 

I 90-1. 
James in 1586-7, 1 7 1-2, 179, 

190-1. 
Likeness to Hamlet, 183, 201- 
2-3-4-5-6-7, 209, 210-11, 
222-3. 
" Joannes Factotum, " 127-8. 
Johnson, Dr. Sam., 25, 140. 
"Jointress," its meaning, 197. 
Jonson, Ben, 139, 142, 147-8. 
Joy of life, 155. 
Julius Caesar, 31 to 37. 

K 

Karpf, C, 89. 

Kenney, 100. 

Kentucky theory of Hamlet, 

210. 
Keynote in first words, 55. 
Keynote of Hamlet, 82-3, 93 to 

104, 157, 182, 190. 
Keynote of Macbeth, 55-6. 
Kreyssig, 100. 

"Kind Hart's Dream," 128. 
King John, 30, 118, 158. 
King Lear, 37, 46, 78, 91-2, 
Knight, Charles, 40, iii, 117. 
"Know Thyself! " 41. 
Kyd, Thomas, 120-1-2-3, 135, 

138, 139, 151. 



Lady Macbeth, 44, 60, 63 to 69. 
Laertes, 184, 188, 213, 219. 



230 



INDEX. 



' ' Legal acquirements of Shake- 
speare," 127, 144. 

Legend of Hamlet, 178-9, 188, 
192-3-4. 

Legend of Macbeth, 49-50. 

Leiceste;-, Lord, 170-1, 176, 
221. 

Leo's criticism, 67. 

Lesson of Hamlet, 82-3, 87-8, 
93-4-5, 98, 100 to 104, 190. 

Lesson of Macbeth, 53, 71, 82-3. 

Literary aspiration, 19, 20. 

Literary collaboration, 115. 123, 

.^25. 

Literary education, 128-9, 

Literature; its definition, 19-20. 

Literature; its quickening pow- 
er, 19, 20-1-2, 42. 

Literature to be studied in liter- 
ature, 24, 34. 

Lodge, 129, 134. 

Lost Soul, A, 71. 

Love of evil, 50. 

" Love's Labor's Lost," 118-9, 
122. 

"Love's Labor's Won," 119. 

Lov/ell, Jas. Russell, 40, 87-8, 
188-9-90. 

Lowndes, 121. 

Loyal zeal, 155, 165-6. 

Lyly, 124, 135, 136, 139, 151. 

Lyric power of Macbeth, 46. 

M 
Macbeth (Lecture 2d), 41 to 71. 
Burger's unconscious traves- 
ty, 57. 
Character of Macbeth, 61-2- 

3, 65, 69-70. 
Complement of Hamlet, 48, 

94-5- 
Dramatis Personse. (See Lady 

Macbeth, Duncan, etc.) 
Estimates of the play, 40, 

45-6. 
Grandeur, Its, 37, 47, 78. 
Incompleteness, 45. 
Keynote, 55-6-7, 94-5. 



Lyric movement, 55-6. 
Moral lesson, 39, 53-4-5, 65, 

69-70-1. / 

Parallel with Hamlet, 48, 

94-5. 

Plot, 49, 50-1-2. 

Remorse of Lady Macbeth, 
44, 60, 63, 69. 

Remorse of Macbeth, 69-70. 

Reticence of Macbeth, 61-2. 

Scotland of Macbeth, 5 1-2. 

Shakespeare's greatest poem, 
45-6-7-8. 
Mad, Was Hamlet? 92-3, 11 1. 
Madness, 93. 
Malone, 120, 144. 
Man, the greatest mystery, 94. 
Marlowe, Christophei", 115-6, 

123, 128, 135 to 139, 142, 

156, 173. 
Mary, Queen of Scots, 160 to 
191. (See also James I . , Darn - 
ley and Bothwell.) 
Apostrophe by Swinburne, 

220. 
An accessory to Darnley's 
murder, 181, 185, 195-6-7. 
EngHsh hatred and machina- 
tions, 169 to 176. 
Execution, 175, 185. 
Fascination, 220. 
Innuendoes of Sh. ? 180-I, 

184. 
Marriage to Bothwell, 178-9, 

181-2. 
Master of Grey's letter, 172-3. 
Mm-der of Darnley, 173-4-5, 

178-9, 181, 191. 
Political intrigues, 169 to 176. 
Plumptre's argument, 174, 
180 to 184. 
Masque, The, 122. 
Massinger, Life of, 146. 
Master of Grey, 172-3. 
Menaphon, Greene's, 126. 
Merchant of Venice, 37, 118. 
Meres, Francis, 118-^-20, 130, 
149. 



INDEX. 



231 



Metaphysics of Shakespeare, 

156, 165. 
Method of Composition, 151- 

2-3- 
Method of study, 31 to 37. 
"Midsummer Night's Dream," 

108, 122, 178, 180. 
Milton, 141. 

Milton on Shakespeare, 133. 
Milton's Satan, 58. 
Mirror of all mankind, The, 

158-9. 
Mixed metaphor, Goethe's, 76. 
Moberly, 184. 
Moral culture of the drama, 20, 

43-4- 
Moral of Macbeth, 39, 53-4-5, 

65, 69-70-1. 
Moral proportion, Sense of, 

38-9. 
Motives for producing Hamlet, 

162-3, 166, 171 to 178. 
"Much Ado About Nothing," 

108. 
Murder of Duncan, 45, 63. 
" Mystery of Hamlet, The," 

161. 
Mythology, 54. 

N 

Nash, Thomas, 109, 125-6-7, 

129, 135, 138, 139. 
National progress, 30, 163-4. 
" Neckverse, To latinize their," 

126. 
Nemesis, 39, 48, 58, 69-70-1, 

179, 200. 
"No Philosopher," loi. 
Norman mind. The, 164. 
Noverint, The, 126-7, 129, 130, 

144-5, 151- 

O 

Odium theologicum, 160. 
Opportunity, 131, 151. 
Original design of Hamlet un- 



ambitious, 142, 152-3, 161, 

178. 
Osric, 219. 
Othello, 37, 45-6, 78. 
Ownership of plays, 106, 109- 

iio, 152-3. 



Paradox, Werder's, 83-4, 90, 

199. 
Paragon, Hamlet, The, 37, 45, 

78-79, 152. 
Parallel between Bacon and 

Shakespeare, 73-4. 
Parallel between Hamlet and 

Macbeth, 48, 78-9. 87, 94-5. 
Parallel between Shakespeare 

and Marlowe, 137-8-9. 
Parallel between Shakespeare 

and Plutarch, 33. 
Parallelisms between Hamlet 

and Darnley's murder, 173- 

4-5, 178 to 185, 191, 195 to 

198. 
Patriotism of the English, 164-5, 

I74-S- 
Patriotism of Shakespeare, 158- 

9, 165, 167-8. 
Patronage, 127, 167-8, 170-I. 
Peccavi, 104, 157. 
Peele, 135-6, 139. 
Pericles, 118-9, 144-5. 
Permanence of Shakespeare's 

influence, 22, 124, 149, 159. 
Persons of the drama, 91. 
Pessimism, 154-5-6-7. 
Perturbed spirit, The, 1 5 7-8-9. 
Play actors, their standing, 

167-8. 
Play within a play, 85, 121-2, 

145, 216. 
Plays as political devices, 168, 

173-4, 176-7-8. 
Players, Companies of, 109, 140, 

170. 
Player King, The, 216. 
Plots, common property, 123. 



232 



INDEX. 



Plot of Hamlet, 79, 99, 151 to 
154, 161, 173-4, 179, 193-4-5- 

Plot of Macbeth, 49-50. 

Plots against Elizabeth, 160. 

Plots against James I., 52-3. 

Plumptre, Rev. James, 180 to 
186. 

Plutarch and Shakespeare, 33. 

Poetry the basis of the drama, 
102. 

Poet's function is representation, 

93-4- 
Politics, Elizabethan, 164, 168 

to 179. 
Polonius, 179, 182, 184, 213, 

217-8. 
Portraiture in Hamlet, 97, 100- 

1-2-3-4, 157-8, 200-1, 207 to 

217. 
Prae - Shakespearian Hamlet , 

I 14-5, 123. 
Precocious genius of Shake- 
speare, 44, 114 to 142, 154 to 

158, 176-7. 
Precocity of genius, 137, 141-2. 
Pretenders, Royal, 220-1. 
Primacy in letters, 21-2, 42-3, 

72 to 78, 152. 
Proscenium boxes, 122. 
Protestantism of England, 163-4. 
Prototype of Hamlet (Lecture 

7th). Also (James I). 



Quadrilateral, The tragic, 37, 

124. 
Queen, The, an accessary? 181, 

185, 195-6-7. 
Quarto First, 107 to 112, 116, 

119, 175-6, 185. 
Quarto Second, 106 to 112, 116, 

119, 125, 152 to 159. 
" Queens of Scotland, " 178. 



R 



Rapp, M., 91. 



Reaction of guilt, 64-5. 

Reasons for Revision, 119, 154, 
158. 

Recast of Hamlet, The final, 
108, 119, 154, 157-8. 

Regicide, 5, 23, 174 to 178, 199. 

Remorse of Lady Macbeth, 44, 
60, 63, 69. 

Remorse of Macbeth, 69-70. 

Representation, the poet's func- 
tion, 93-4. 

Resolution, Duty of, 104. 

Responsibility, Human, 96-7-8, 

Reticence of Macbeth, 61-2. 

Revenge, Ethics of, 188-9, ^90-ij 
199, 200. 

Revenge, The legacy of, 173, 
189-190-1. 

Reverent study, 24-5-6. 

Richard H., 168. 

Richard m., 78, 118. 

Rizzio, 182, 184, 206. 

Robert Elsmere, 95. 

Roetschl, 90. 

Rolfe, 31. 

Rohrbach, 90. 

Royal title, 62, 81, 84, 194 to 
199. 

Romeo and JuHet, 11 7-8. 

Rosencrantz, 179, 182, 188, 218. 

"Rye's England seen by for- 
eigners," 203. 



Sackville, Lord, 199. 
Sanity, Hamlet's, 92-3, iii. 
Sanity of genius, 132-3, 150. 
Satan, a deceiver, 70. 
Satan, Milton's, 58. 
Saxo-Grammaticus, 178, 188, 

192. 
Scotland, its manners, 187 to 

190. 
Scotland, Macbeth's, 51-2. 
Scotland visited by Shakespeare, 

52, 187. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 157. 



INDEX. 



233 



Scott's, Sir Walter, James I., 

201-2-3. 
Scrope's, Baron, letter, 51-2. 
" Second-best bed, " 74. 
vSecond Quarto, 106 to 112, 116, 

119, 125, 152, 159. 
Selfishness the essence of sin, 71 . 
Self-knowledge, 41-2. 
Self-revelation, 148. 
Self-reproach of Hamlet, 101-2, 

191. 
Self-estimate of Macbeth, 61. 
Shakespeare. 
Ability, Transcendent, 43-4, 
74 to 78, 100, 102, 13 1-2-3, 
138, 150-1-2, 161-2, 177. 
Ambition in Life, 156-7. 
Arrival in London, 125, 127, 

140. 
Art, 99-100, 102, 140-1, 152, 

161-2, 167, 190. 
As an actor, 126-7-8, 140,151. 
Aspiration, 133, 150-1. 
Attacks on him, 126 to 129. 
Attorney's clerk. (See Nev- 
er int.) 
Aversion to publication, 106, 

109, 152-3. 
"Beauties of Shakespeare," 

23, 44. 
Biographical Materials, 138-9, 
143, 146 to 149, 150-1, 

156-7. 
Business talents, 148, 167. 
Characterization of him, 118, 

120, 126, 128-9. 
Contemporary estimates, 118- 

19-20, 128-9, 133, 139, 149, 
Contemptuous biography, 143, 

146. 
Courtier, A., 167-8, 177-8. 
Creative faculty, 100, 102, 

141, 150 to 153, 158. 
Dramatic skill, 44, 50 to 53, 

91-2, 98-9, 100, 141, 152, 

190. 
Early authorship, 115 to 144, 

150, 176-7-8. 



Early environment, 139, 143 

to 146, 150 to 154, 163 to 

170, 
Education, 139, 143-4, 150 

to 154. 
Energy, 132-3. 
Facility, 140. 
Father of romantic drama, 

134 to 139. 
Fecundity, 140. 
Genial temper, 129, 135, 140, 

148. 
Ideality, 189. 
Inspiration to others, 22, 75, 

76. 
"Joannes Factotum," 128. 
Learning, 144-5. 
Legal phraseology, 144-5. 
Literary primacy, 21 to 24, 

42-3, 72 to 78, 152. 
Manifoldness, 43, 72, 77-8, 

102. 
Metaphysics, 156, 165. 
Method of composition, 151- 

2-3- 
Moral vision, 58, 69-70-1, 

74-5) 77> 91-2, 99-100,167. 
"Noverint," 126, 127, 129- 

130, 144-5) 151, 177- 
Parallel vi^ith Bacon, 73. 
Parallel with Marlowe, 125 to 

129. 
Parallel with Plutarch, 33. 
Patriotism, 158-9, 165, 167-8, 

177. 
Patrons, 1 67-8, 170-I. 
Permanence of influence, 22, 

124, 149, 159. 
Personality in Hamlet, His, 

100 to 103, 154 to 157, 165. 
Pessimism, 154 to 157. 
Poetic skill, 141. 
Popularity, 21. 
Precocious genius, 141-2, 176- 

7- 
Psychology, 44, 154 to 158. 
Quasi imiversality, 43, 76-7- 

8, 102. 



234 



INDEX. 



Shakespeare [Continued), 
Rapid rise, 151. 
Reality of his characters, 43- 

4, 66-7, 74, 91-2, 103, 152, 

186-7. 
Rhetoric, 23, 44, 141. 
Sanity of his genius, 132-3, 150. 
Skepticism, 95, 100, 155, 165. 
Supernaturalism, 53 to 60. 
Teachers, Alleged, 123,138-9. 
" This Shakescene, " 128. 
Visit to Scotland, 52, 187. 
Worth as a man,i29, 135,148. 
Writings, where found, 26 to 

29, 106 to 112, 116, 119, 

125, 152, 159, 175-6, 185. 
"Shakespeare as a lawyer," 

127, 144. 
" Shakespeare's Legal Acquire- 
ments," 127, 144. 
"Shakespeare's Scholar," 25. 
"Shakespeare, The footsteps 

of," 144. 
Shakespearian Study. 
Academic instruction, 29, 30 

to 37. 
Advantages, 21, 22-3-4, 29, 

36. 
Historical point of view, 30, 

33 to 36. 
Method of study, 24, 29 to 37. 
Psychological study, 38-9-40, 

44. 
Reverent study, 24-5-6. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 180. 

Sievers, 90. 

Significance of Hamlet. (See 
Lecture 3d.) Also 161-2. 

Silberschlag, 180, 183-4. 

Skepticism of Shakespeare, 95, 
100, 155, 165. 

Skepticism, 154, 163-4-5-6. 

Skottowe, 120. 

Smith, Wm. Henry, 142-3, 146. 

Social conditions of Shake- 
speare's times, 188-9, 190- 

Soliloquies, Hamlet's, 154-5, 
207. 



Soul-paralysis, 69, 95 to 99, 104. 

Southampton, Earl of, 127, 171. 

" Spanish tragedy. The," 120-1. 
138. 

Spirit of the age, 163, 165. 

Spiritual symbolism, 53 to 60. 

Stability of Shakespeare's in- 
fluence, 22, 124, 149, 158-9 

"Stationers' Register, The," 

157, 175. 

Staunton, 117. 

Story, Wm. W., 56-7, 85, 155-6. 

Strange, Lord, 140, 170. 

" Strickland's Miss, Q. of Scot- 
land," 178. 

Study of Shakespeare. (See 
Shakespeare Study.) 

Summary, Authorship of First 
Hamlet, 130-1. 

Summary, Argument for pro- 
totype, 221-2. 

Supernaturalism of Shakespeare, 
53 to 60. 

Sussex, Lord, 171. 

Swinburne on Shakespeare's 
plays, 46. 

Swinburne's apostrophe to Mary 
Stuart, 220. 

Symonds, 120, 137. 



Talents and genius, 33, 91-2, 
131-2-3. 

" Tamburlaine, " 137-8. 

"Taming of the Shrew," 117- 
8-9, 121. 

Taylor, Nath'l W., 164. 

Teachers, Shakespeare's al- 
leged, 123, 138-9. 

Tempest, The, 35, 37, 78. 

Tests of genius, 131-2-3. 

Text, Sacrifice of the, 2 14. 

Text, verity of, 26 to 29, 106. 

Thomas a-Kempis, 60. 

Theories about Hamlet. (See 
Hamlet.) 

Theory of Hamlet, Kentucky, 



INDEX. 



235 



Theory, Plumptre's, 180 to 186. 
"Thirty years old," 182, 21 1 

to 216. 
Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas, 

179, 217. 
Time-Spirit, The, 163, 165. 
Timmins, 116. 
Title to throne, Claudius', 84, 

i94-5» 197-8-9- 
" Titus Andronicus," 118, 144, 

145- 
Topography of Hamlet, 183, 

186-7-8, 222. 
Topography of Macbeth, 5 1 . 
" Tragedy of blood, The," 

121, 151. 
Tragic art, 37-8 , 99, 100. 
Tragic quadrilateral, 37, 124. 
Travesty, Unconscious, 57, 89, 

90. 
" Truth, What is ? " 163-4. 
"Two Gentlemen of Verona." 

118, 144, 145. 

U 

Unconsciousness of geniuG, 153. 
Universality in literature, 43, 

76-7-8, 102. 
" University witSp" 134-5-6. 

V 

Vacillation of Hamlet, 48, 94-5, 

99. 
Vacillation of Aiuiel, 96-7-8. 



Venus and Adonis, 127, 140-1. 
"Vicious Mole," 18. 
Voltaire's criticism, 91. 

W 

Walsingham, 169, 171, 176, 205. 

Warburton, 25. 

Weldon, Sir A., 201-2. 

Weever, 149. 

Weird Sisters, The, 55-6, 58-9, 

62-3. 
Werder's Theory, 83-4, 90, 

199. 
Whipple, 40. , 
White, Richard Grant, 24 to 

28, 40, 108, 177, 213. 
Whole duty of man, 71. 
Wilhelm Meister, quoted, 75-6, 

80-1-2-3, 217-8. 
Witches, 52, 54. 
Withdrawal of Hamlet from 

stage, 108. 
Will and Fate, 48, 59, 79, 82-3, 

88, 92-3-4, 99, 100, 165, 190, 

200. 
" Wit's treasury," 118. 
Wotton, Dr., 182. 



"Yorick, Poor," 212. 

Z 
Zimmerman, 1S60 



oy 



SEP -1W34 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Feb. 2009 

Preservationlechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



